Hi,

from the point of view of a designer, one of the main problems of using a prebuilt cms is that they might now be flexible enough. Most cms's are think to be just plug and play. So, even if you can edit its templates (a good cms lets you do that), there's always something custom that you need (some crazy thing like say, you want your first two news in gray, the third in blue, the fourth in orange, and if it has pictures, then it should have another font, etc). When you need something custom, then no cms is going to work....unless you customize it.

There are good cms that let you do a lot from just the templates, and usually have a way to create plugins, to add functionality. But, of course, you'd need to have some knowledge of php or whatever programming language the cms uses.

There are good cms like Typo3 (www.typo3.org), that are very flexible, and allow you to add anything to your site, complete control, yes, but it's very complicated to customize it, and develop stuff with it. It took me like 3 months to learn all the ins and outs of it.

There are others like mambo: easy, friendly, but the code is awful. Me, as a coder, I just hate it. Usually it's a charm with small sites.

I mostly do flash websites, so I had to build my own CMS that works for flash and html, though man, it sucks now, it's been patched 1000 times, so I'm recoding everything now.

Anyway, another option you can have, instead of having a full cms for your whole site, you can use several scripts for each part of your site that will be updated frequently. There are scripts just for news, less potent than blogs (that allow for categories, tags, monthly archives, daily archives, rss feeds, etd). There are scripts to manage photo galleries, scripts to just update simple html content, etc. If you don't have experience in coding, but want to have your site as you want and not as a prebuilt cms forces you to, then you'd choose severeal small scripts to manage each part of your site. (Yes, a cms can be customized to work on any site, but usually, you'd need to now some programming to do that).

I hope I was somehow helpful.