CMS or Static, that is the question

I have used both. I used to do some freelance work for small companies on the side in college and mostly I either set up a shopping cart or phpWebsite for them and they were thrilled.

I just started as an IT director at a small company and first duty is to redesign the website to look better. The owner is a salesman not an IT person, so the site now is simple, but has poor navigational layout.

He wants this job done ASAP so we can start moving into some other areas. The website acts a portal for the internet kiosks he owns in the area. Local businesses pay a couple hundred $100 a year to have their links and or logos appear on various pages. There are not a lot of updates made to the site currently, however the site is well over 30 pages.

We have a template we like to design the new site from, but I am torn between doing it in HTML and using GoLive to manage the pages/site and setting up a CMS and using the template in the CMS.

It will proably take longer to setup the CMS the way we want it, but then as the site grows, maintaince becomes easier. The HTML pages are faster loading, which is what we are looking for, but could take a bit more time to maintain.

The basic template will not take that long to set up and with GoLive managing the site I can make changes and update in a matter of seconds. I am converting the pages to .php extensions so we can use add ins like phpadsnew to manage the banners sold on CPM and CPC basis, however most of the business has just static links.

Any recomendations here, ideas, suggestions?

make templates using php

i do this by using include()'s in my php files coupled with links drawn from a database.

so for example if every page has the same banner and links heading you wold make a header file named header.htm and maybe a links section named links.php

in whatever page you design do this

<?php
include ("templates/header.htm");
include ("templates/links.php");
...
?>

that would include those two files, which have the appropriate html to display whatever you need.

That's what we are going to do for the ads. Have an <? include ("path"); ?>. The navigation will be tabbed based and each section has a different header.

I've looked at about a dozen OS CMS systems, but none have really jumped out at me. I am getting a little sick of the generic postnuke cloned site. It works for some cases, but its just a little BLAH for what we are doing. Although once the content is in place, it doesn't change very much.

Don't forget about server side includes. If the content on the page is static, there's no need for scripting.

yeah, but even if its static, he might want to change the layout or whatever later.

. . . which also does not require scripting

A combination of Server Side Includes and CSS can leave open options to update and change layouts later without too much hassle.

i know, thats why im saying he should use scripting

Why, when all you need is SSI?

I forgot about SSI. That maybe the answer for now.