CMS vs. Straight HTML for a site?

Question

I'm going to start work on a site for a client and I'm struggling with how to go about doing it. They want (in order of priority)

1. A site that looks pretty and is functional in that it will present the information they want in a way that makes sense.
2. A site that is easy to update and add to. The guy who will be doing the updates is a smart guy and can figure things out, but he's not a programmer.

So I started off thinking that I could bend Wordpress to my will. They have a very specific design that they created, so I'd have to make my own Wordpress theme. But I'm using Wordpress Pages to create the (many) pages they need to have created. I'm kind of struggling with bending the navigation to work with these pages. For instance, I need the links to the children pages to only show up when a parent page is showing. I've poked around for plugins, but I haven't had much luck finding one, and I don't think I'm really up to hacking together my own plugin.

I could just make a theme where it's just the main nav and the logo and put the rest of the code in the pages, but then I might as well go for straight HTML.

I've had some limited experience with Joomla and Drupal. Do any of you guys know if I can get this done easier with those CMSs?

I'm leaning towards the straight HTML route and then walking them through how to update it and mess with it on their own. But I have a fear that I'll be their long term tech support in the future.

Any advice?

Thanks. :)

Answer 1

I think it massively depends on your skills, your client and the guy updating it. In my experience you can never go wrong with simple HTML. Choosing anything else is either a headache to setup or a headache to maintain, or most likely both.

Answer 2

Since you're doing work for a client, definitely give it a strong go with a CMS like Joomla before rolling your own. Making your own site will add future cost to your client if you can avoid it. Using an existing CMS means that someone else can take over your work much more easily. It also means reducing the amount of support you'll have to provide, as Joomla (etc.) have communities of users who can help out with issues.

Answer 3

You'd be best off installing some sort of pre-built CMS. PHP-Fusion is a good one that runs on PHP and MySQL (the basic W/LAMP stack), and is very highly customizable.

It's easy for you to set up, it's themable, and it's easy for them to keep updated. There's also a ton of plugins you can make use of.

Please keep in mind that PHP-Fusion is an easy CMS to set up, easy to configure as an admin, and easy to modify, but it's not as powerful as say Joomla is. It may be a good intermediary application to set up quickly while you get a more scalable one built. They can both use the same database, and the data is the heart of most web applications, so it won't be too big a deal to migrate over.

Answer 4

If they are cool with straight HTML and don't have the budget to do a fancy CMS, just go with straight HTML.

If they are willing to spend the extra money to get a cool CMS, then you can afford spend the time on customizing a wordpress or even learn drupal. You could even create your own using PHP, Rails!

Answer 5

How likely is the 'custom design' to change. From my experience, when I see things like a group has a specific design already created but they are not doing the work - all I hear are the future changes and potential headaches I will face. Joomla might be the most action ready approach. Building templates and applying them to related pages is a little challenging but once you do it a few times, it is fairly quick to pick up.

In my opinion, Wordpress, IS NOT a CMS.

Answer 6

I think Wordpress, or some CMS, is a better solution in the long run because it can get very hairy maintaining things like archives, comments, categories, tags, etc. with straight HTML. Plus, with a popular CMS like Wordpress, you can utilize the wealth of plugins that are developed by others. It would also be much more user-friendly to present your client with a pretty user interface (i.e. Wordpress's web interface) rather than a bunch of HTML files that must be manually maintained.

As for your "I need the links to the children pages to only show up when a parent page is showing" problem, you can organize Wordpress Pages hierarchically, then make use of that hierarchy in the theme PHP. See "if is a page, or a child of a page, or in a category (a solution)" for some sample Wordpress PHP.