Hello raubin; No your not wrong to post here, feedback is what makes forums work and your input is greatly valued. I respect your position on RAW HTML web development as I use it to this day for hard coded database connects for things like my task manager or my code snippet inventory on my domain.
Can I demonstrate a positive side to CMS systems though? I think this one articulates why I'm a fan of them.
I use to be anti CMS right up until I realized how important SEO and content management really was.
I had a struggle with a guy over a year ago that had his School District site built for about $14,000 and was pretty happy with it right up until he started losing rank, index position, and finally control over structure and content thus later realized he had to make a change and gain some form of control. Well the long story short, all of his site was hard coded and nearly every single instance of color or font were inline styles done in some editor. NONE of it any good and in fact the quasi template engine was really not a template engine but a banner manager hacked to work like a template engine which only complicated matters.
The bulk rebuild of his site was quoted to him at $8,500 before I told him there is a much more affordable solution that would cost him 4 month time and $2,800 to have me re do all the 1600 pages by hand. I explained that since each and every department in their school district were pretty much settled on doing whatever they felt they could, they simply would and to gain control, a system that required permissions and a set format of rules is what would save him future headaches.
Naturally I approached them with the CMS, showed them that the US Army, the Queen of England and a half dozen universities I knew of were all Joomla. Impressed, they said yes they have never regretted it.
I built a new District Wide Style Guide (fundamental for all commercial projects) Removed ALL inline styling, all tables all nested containers and every single piece of worthless HTML markup I could find to extract the raw content and dump it into a database. Then we can change anything as we please following the custom style guide.
The benefit is that the site has a consistent look, feel and ease of management. Not to mention CMS systems allow you to assign custom title tags, change those tags, assign editors, writers, administrators, managers, charge for services, and the list goes on.
Now for Realtors and Real Estate Agents We came up with a Real Estate variant of Joomla appropriately called "Joomla Real Estate Edition" which has all of the fundamental modifications, custom plugins and custom scripting already configured for real estate professionals to handle dynamic listings in their site, integrated blog for search engine food, and about 7 custom modules we added to it to act as an ideal turnkey solution.
But then again I'm a bit biased having worked with both methods.
Here are two screen shots of the modified version we are now using for Realtors and Agents;
~ Jared
Joomla
Linear Mode
