: Welcome to web world, dude. A website has many points to be observed. Programming, SEO, design, usability... It definetively not a simple task. Nice too see you care about future maintenance

Welcome to web world, dude.

A website has many points to be observed. Programming, SEO, design, usability... It definetively not a simple task. Nice too see you care about future maintenance instead of just getting job done.

But as any project, start it by its requirements definitions. A few questions can help you out deciding what is better.

Does this site need to sell online, implement any kind of payment/transaction, or is it just informative?
How often will content be changed? Once a year? Once a week? Many times a day?

The answers will lead you to the best approach.

CMS like Joomla and Drupal are used for content management. They make the task of input new entries and sections easier. But they are not so nice for other programming, like selling and so on. And yeah, they have plugins and addons that can power up those platforms.

Frameworks, like Kohana, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, PHP on Trax, are fine for quick development (but even a simple application to insert new entries to a database will require you to do a little coding). And yeah, they are easy to extend, implement new changes, and have a lot of addons and plugins, so making a payment routine can be trivial.

The other option is to code everything yourself. You can learn a lot, and despite all other powerful solution, this can be the faster way to achieve results if the requirements shows too simple. (You don't need an airplane to got to the closest groceries store, you can simply walk).

Other than this will resume to texts, photos, ilustrations, typography, visual identity, visual hierarchy... And all these are not simple too. Ask your friend all the material he can provide.