Thanks so much for the advice! My primary concern with Wordpress is that it has been around long enough that it could actually be harder to set up because of out of date tutorials, and that I've been told it's got a lot of security issues. I also have a vague horrible memory of trying to install it in 2006 or 2007 and it being a disaster to customize... but I don't want to hold that against it in 2014. On the other hand, I've been told that because it's a blogging platform (is it really?) it's easier to update content through the web interface, and that makes it get higher rankings on Google (for now).

I don't know enough to evaluate any of these claims or worries; do you think that they're still true? I certainly absolutely positively have no problem paying for a high quality theme, I'm much more worried about creating a mess on my server that will take dozens of hours of attention to clean up.