I have been developing and maintaining web sites for fifteen years. Although I have always striven to provide clean – maintainable – websites, I find, when I look at some of the old code, I have not done as well as I had hoped. Not that I’m bad – it’s just that times and standards change.
A couple of years ago, I jumped on the Joomla! bandwagon. Joomla! is a website content management system that is a complete package. The one MAJOR drawback, I found, is it can be extremely complicated. My average customer would be overwhelmed, period.
A few months ago, I finally took a look at WordPress. All I can say is “wow!”. I know it is intended to be “blogging” software, BUT, it just happens to serve very nicely as a content manager! AND (and this is a BIG and), it is simple to use!
Another big plus is the support. Finally, no site owner needs to be reliant on his/her developer. There are literally millions of free and/or for profit “themes” available. Because WordPress separates the “look” (or theme) from the “content”, CHANGING the look of your site simply entails acquiring and changing the theme.
Finally, WordPress is such a standard that it is supported on most any web host. So one can MOVE a site to another host with very little effort, as well.