Hi Jake,
I've done this and am thinking about doing it a whole lot more. My reseller web hosting has a feature that makes it really easy to install WP on client sites. Then you hardly even need to write any code, you just log in. Creating a new "skin" --or merging your own design with the wordpress output code-- is the creative challenge but it sounds like you won't even have to worry about the code implementation, you just do the layout? You're stoked. Anyway when the code designers do get to that point, they can create a new theme or just edit the css for the default themes; and there's a built-in online application that makes editing the css and all the included files really easy. I'm actually wondering how much I can legitimately charge somebody to do a simple WP install for them, if I also take the time to create their first couple of pages and install the theme of their choice from the WP themes site. I thought maybe in order to make my work more valuable I could also do a custom "contact us" page that includes a web contact form, because sometimes you just want to receive a message; you don't necessarily want people posting to your blog site every time they need to contact you.

Anyhow you can create either static pages or blog pages, they are organized differently within the site architecture; and you can decide whether or not you want to allow comments on any given page or article. The pest part is the search feature, makes me wish I had started doing this sooner, would have saved me some time!!!

I think your clients will be happy with the end result. Best of luck to you.

It's very flexible via plugins, and the roles/limits make it harder for a client to munge things too badly. If you get way out there with lots of plugins you can suffer performance hits, but otherwise, it's quite a popular approach.

Check:
www.bloggingpro.com/archives...ordpress/

performancing.com/blogging-...-wordpress

onemansgoal.com/144/101-wo...nown-about/

mashable.com/2007/07/27/...-multimedia/

mashable.com/2007/07/26/...min-plugins/

www.bloggingpro.com/archives...blogging/

Probably your biggest hassle could be translating the PS design to template, but there are folks who that very well for a flat fee.

I have built a number of sites based on Wordpress. There are lots of highly functional plug-ins that make things easier for the programmer and more functional for the user. Also, the ability of wordpress to display a page that is different than the blog as the index is really nice. If you want to PM me I could give you some more advice on it...

It is of course easy to screw things up by the programmer (isn't that always the case?) however, once everything is in the right place, it works nicely.

A few things that make the interface easier for clients are:
deanjrobinson.com/projects/...ncy-admin/
wordpress.org/extend/plug...p-down-menu/ (or one of the other drop down menu plug-ins)

here is a site built on wordpress that I made:
www.jivahealth.com
All of the content is updatable by the client via the admin panel, even the pop-up overlay windows which use a combination of hidden pages/dropdown-menu, thickbox/jquery plugin and page templates.

I've done this too and it's great. Even for "static" pages within the site you can use the WP function calls to create navigation, lists of posts, etc. My own site (miamiastrology dot com) uses WP for the blogs and for a lot of stuff on the home page, even though the homepage is a custom coded hack of html and WP.