Regular website or blog/cms for company?

My brother-in-law requested to host a site about his company that mostly showed his work (lot of photo's), and some details about location etc.

So now i'm thinking what to do? I register the domain. I created his space on the server, but should I make a site or go with a CMS/blog/gallery? I don't want to spend weeks creating the site and go crazy on CSS trouble again in IE.

Also he must be able to make changes on his own from time to time. And he doesn't know anything about html,php,ruby,ajax. Therefore I was thinking about a cms or blog type. Though i'm not sure as it require me to keep track of DB make backups..

Any thoughts?

I'd make an simple control panel to add or remove stuff.

Also make it an portfolio site or blag, depending if he wants to babble about stuff and not only show his stuff.

No he doesn't want to have a forum or talk every day. He put in new kitchens at people home. And need to show what he can offer and previous work done. And some details on howto contact him for work. So maybe blog isn't really meant for this, but it would allow to quick add/remove photo's and such.

i would use a cms like typo3 or joomla. once you have learned how to use them it's much less work to do a website with them than doing one yourself from scratch with html and php. there are many extensions for different photo galleries and your brother-in-law will be able to log into the backend for making updates and changes in an easy way.

i like typo3 a lot and it didn't take me longer than a week to learn it. currently i am also looking into joomla which is smaller and simpler. probably it's best to get some book about them.

use joomla. its simpler and smaller.

and if u want cheap domains and hosting. check out my site: www.delinkx.com

websiteBaker. joomla is huge and really take some time to customize. install websitebaker instead, it's only around 400k, add the modules you want, and for the style template, you only need to edit a single php file.

@delinkx: Thanks for the offer in case your reply was geared towards me, but i have already two dedicated linux and windows 2008 servers plus a vps at my disposal. I might be interested in a cpanel/plesk license if you are a reseller of those as well though.

@broozar I try websitebaker it looks very easy to maintain. I know joomla and always ended up creating hacks to get it working my way and after a security update everything had to be done by hand again. So I stay away from joomla although its nice and I have some commercial templates for it somewhere.

To all, thanks for the suggestions. Now lets get this thing online.