Just to confirm… are you using in5 to export HTML? Or using Publish Online?

Object styles would be a great start.
There are some other tricks for making text more flexible when it moves from left to right hand pages, such as using the Align Away from Spine spine… but sometimes, it just requires manual cleanup.

I never recommend people use Basic Paragraph style. As you have probably seen in other posts, it is not a good idea to use Basic, if you can avoid it. If you’re going to change to something, change to a new paragraph style (make one yourself, such as “StoreyBasic”)

That’s weird… how can you do the InDesign layout before “getting into the stylistic stuff”? Typically, you’d do the design first, and then create the layout.

Can you give us a few examples of what you’re trying to find? It sounds like things like “David Blatner ’88” — is that right?

You want to apply No Break, but then you say you don’t want the last name brought down or the number gets pulled up… isn’t that the whole point of no break? What would want it to do?