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Comment by cooperadymas | Hacker News Reader

(All of this based on my personal experience.)

WordPress has become popular enough that many smaller businesses who need a (new) website and do a few minutes of research often come across it. Most of what they read tells them that it's the best platform for their website. They don't really know why, or what WordPress does, but they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.

The same thing used to happen with Flash. Clients would come to me insistent on having a Flash website, or at the very least, a Flash intro page. This one there does come with an inherent problem. Thankfully, this one has gone to the wayside.

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"WordPress has become popular enough ... they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website."

From my personal experience, small businesses really want to just be able to infrequently add or update content. Most of the time, WordPress seems like a huge hammer for small nails.

Can anyone recommend a light-weight system that allows the "regular folks" add or update content without the extras (such as changing "themes", etc)?

WordPress does fit this bill. You can edit user permissions to let the "regular folks" edit the content without seeing all the settings, themes, plugins, etc. If you are handing over projects to a client I recommend giving anyone who updates content on the site an Author or Editor account. The Admin account should be used only for the admin stuff by someone who has an idea of what they're doing.

If you want something lighter yet, I highly recommend http://getkirby.com/ (no affiliation, just a fan). It's very lightweight, runs on a variation of MarkDown, highly flexible, and unlike most of the "static site generators" out there it has a minimal panel for adding and editing content. The $39 per site license is well worth it.

Anyone have any relevant experience with Umbraco?

i've made several big websites in Umbraco. It's very powerful, but has a bit of a learning curve for both developers and editors. At the moment, both the programming model and the UI are pretty out of date

I know that they are working on a new UI for the backend.

How is the programming model out of date? I am looking at getting into it via the new v6.0. It has ASP.NET MVC support but the CMS itself is still WebForms.

I worked a little in Umbraco on some content on existing installations. I guess if you run a Windows server, it's a good alternative. But I'd recommend ModX or Joomla before that.

a jekyll based site hosted on github, and using prose.io to update the repository.

static html is the way to go these days.

I don't think "regular folks" are going to be creating websites with Jekyll and Github anytime soon.

You can't really tell your customer to use a cli tool to build the website and upload it with ftp. The whole point of dynamic website cms:es is that the customer easily can update the content themselves.

You missed his point. The fact that a website is generated from a db has nothing to do with how easy it is to update, besides the fact that there exist cms's that both happen to be easy to update and use dB's.

What I'm seeing is people who already have some experience with WordPress, and are accustomed to the admin screens. Any alternative/custom CMSs are seen to be "difficult to use" when compared to WordPress.

How about http://get-simple.info/? It works similar to WordPress but it's just a simple CMS.

I have had a similar experience with small businesses over the past year. Even if they don't know what WordPress is someone has told them that they should use WordPress.

I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.

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