LAMP: Linux Apache MySQL PHP

Starting with a CMS is an essential headstart when putting together a web site and there are two to condenders, drupal and joomla.  I cannot say which is better, and have worked with both, and there there are many variables in deciding. 

Both are very similiar in that there is a huge community creating and maintaining extensions and modules.  Not only are the a CMS, they offer a huge variety of plugins ranging from ecommerce, editors, social networking, forums, blogs, just about everything.  Furthermore there usually is more than one project for each so there are many options to choose from.

The greatest benefit of these projects is controlling cost of development since a major part of the project is done, and the job is configuration.  When new features are wanted, there is a substancial code base to work from.

I am very suspicious of starting a project from "scratch" when there is so many open source projects.

The greatest advantage of a CMS is after all the smoke clears, and the site looks and work as specified, it can easily be maintained by a non-technical person.  New pages, can be added, menu items can be easiliy added to existing menues, images and other media content can be added.  This is a huge advantage over propriatary solutions and static web pages.  Also, if there are changes to be made,  greater than what can be done with cascading style sheets, the changes will be applied globaly.  This is not possible with static web pages.

Another extremely valuable feature of the above projects is that they follow the design patter of a MVC, Model View Controller.   The beauty of the "view" is that content entered in can have many faces depending on the module configuration (joomla) .  For example, content can be viewed on your computer with a browser, formatted for printing, as well as for a mobile device.