Hi Matt! You said the following in a comment above:
“Another huge problem I have with Wordpress as a CMS is that it forces you to fit your content to the template/theme of the site, which is backwards. Content is the most important component of any site, and I feel that in order to maximize the effectiveness of your site, you need to develop the content first and design the site to display that content in the most effective way possible.”

I totally agree with you on your point about content. But without belaboring the point too much, I believe that each page of a WordPress site, if built using the right theme (the Thesis theme springs to mind), can look very different and provide a webmaster with great design flexibility with hardly more than a few clicks in some checkboxes. Yet the site can retain the desired consistent overall look and feel (or NOT, come to think of it, if you’re into that approach ). There’s another free theme out there called Atahualpa (can be found on the WordPress.org site at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa) which I’ve used with great success, and it’s almost as flexible as Thesis is.

And keep in mind that the previous paragraph is written by a guy who doesn’t know jack about CSS or anything like that.

Hi Matt! You said the following in a comment above:
“Another huge problem I have with Wordpress as a CMS is that it forces you to fit your content to the template/theme of the site, which is backwards. Content is the most important component of any site, and I feel that in order to maximize the effectiveness of your site, you need to develop the content first and design the site to display that content in the most effective way possible.”

I totally agree with you on your point about content. But without belaboring the point too much, I believe that each page of a WordPress site, if built using the right theme (the Thesis theme springs to mind), can look very different and provide a webmaster with great design flexibility with hardly more than a few clicks in some checkboxes. Yet the site can retain the desired consistent overall look and feel (or NOT, come to think of it, if you’re into that approach ). There’s another free theme out there called Atahualpa (can be found on the WordPress.org site at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa) which I’ve used with great success, and it’s almost as flexible as Thesis is.

And keep in mind that the previous paragraph is written by a guy who doesn’t know jack about CSS or anything like that.

If you need to do more, like add a MLS search for a real estate site (The San Juan Realty Inc. site), or an ecommerce software package (The Ouray Ice Park site has one), those would be separate installs requiring separate software. With some coding magic, you can hardly notice that one page is totally different software from another. It does however complicate things when you start combining systems. Just like cooking dinner in more than one pot, requires more work.

If you want to get “big” and have all sorts of things happening with your website, then you’ll need something heavier duty than WordPress or even a simple ecommerce software package. Likely, you’ll have a team of designers, coders, and programmers working to build you something “special” that will have a very “big” and very “special” price tag to go along with it.

WordPress is a better fit for smaller scale websites, that require a smaller scale price tag.