Script or html?

I am planning to start a new site which will be a kind of ezine. It will contain reviews, articles, how-to sections and a wallpaper gallery and it might have an integrated forum as well.

I am wondering if it would be better to go with a CMS system or HTML/CSS. I do like the ease of updating content in a CMS, however what I don’t like is the templates that are available for most of the popular CMS packages. Frankly I haven’t come across a single template for Joomla or any other cms package that looks impressive.

Because of this I am leaning toward the static site, since it will not only consume less resource, but it will also look better and it will give me freedom to place different objects on the home page as I want. However it also means that I cannot ask my co writers to post articles and updating the look and feel at a later stage would be a pain. But it should be easier to SEO than a CMS based site.

What you think about this situation? Any idea which CMS would work well for me (I don’t really need user management since its not going to be a community project). I just need to build a site that looks good, is easier to update and manage and not to forget easier to SEO.

If any one of you has come across a site/template for Joomla/Mambo that breaks away from the standard look than please let me know.

If you're going to do your own design in html/css, then you can surely create your own templates for any prepackaged software, which requires nothing but html/css.

For what you're doing I would recommend simple blog software like WordPress. You have just as much control over the layout as if you made all static pages, which is a horrid idea which will cost you hours upon hours of work down the line.

If you really really don't want to create templates for some reason, roll your own script to do what you want. It can be exceedingly simple; 2 files. One selects all the articles from your database and lists links to them, and the other displays the single article someone clicked on. Now you have only two files to edit in order to change the entire design of your site no matter how much you write.

You can always edit the template of the script yourself, if you know graphic design of course. If not, then you can also buy a custom template. I'm sure someone on this forum would do it for a reasonable fee. Just make a thread in the appropriate section if your interested in doing so. Just supply an idea of what your looking for.