Fair enough, I half expected to get called out. My original comment suggested that what was needed (particularly for non-developers) was a "nice clean user-frie

Fair enough, I half expected to get called out. My original comment suggested that what was needed (particularly for non-developers) was a "nice clean user-friendly front end". Wordpress, although incredibly popular, is IMHO, a usability nightmare and does not fit the bill. It is one of the least intuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I have recently spent some time searching twitter for people having problems with wordpress, and I know i'm not alone. In any case, for the websites I am talking about (small non-technical businesses in particular), wordpress is overkill and operates at a higher layer of abstraction then necessary. Also, such a solution has almost all the disadvantages of wordpress (Finding wordpress hosting [These guys are not going to have their own on-premise wordpress install], setting up and configuring wordpress, keeping wordpress and plugins up-to-date), for very little advantage (slightly more consistent load times? ). Just putting a CDN in front of it would get you most of the way there. It's also hard to recommend a good wordpress host [The exception to this is sandstorm, which is amazing and does the wordpress->static thing exactly right]. Managed wordpress is what you want, but it's bloody expensive (again, IMO, but these kinds of customers are generally cheap). Anything more hands-on than fully manged hosting is a lot of work and maintenance for something these people are realistically NOT going to use on a daily basis. I think Wix and Squarespace serve a very much needed part of the market, and I wish I could point people at an elegant open source solution that would allow "normal" people to have affordable websites backed by S3 or Github pages (like us developers enjoy).