How to separate product name and description into different table columns?

I'm customizing the category pages where it lists a table of products in that category and I can't figure out how to get it to do what I want it to do. I've read a few forum threads on adding new fields to products but nothing quite matches.

Basically, I want to take the product name and product description that are in the same table cell now and separate them into 2 columns. I can't even figure out what file I need to be editing to make this happen. Here is an example of a page I'm trying to do this on.

I managed to hack together something that accomplishes this, but probably in a less than ideal way.

In product_listing.php I edited the line that defines the contents of PRODUCT_LIST_NAME to close the current cell and open a new one between the name and description. This gets most of the table cells lined up right but not the TH headers. To get those in order I edited the english.php language file to define TABLE_HEADING_PRODUCTS as 'Item Name</th><th>Product Description'.

This solution works but seems like it probably isn't ideal. Not sure if it's ok to have html in the language file defines and doing it this way doesn't let the new column header be a proper click to sort by this column.