Who manages a website?

Hi,

I manage, develop and run several Websites privat and in my Business with visitors up to several Millions per day.
A good start is wordpress for sure. It is well known, there are many Design options and Plugins you can customize it as you wish and there are much Tutorials to learn from.
Website Maintainance is always a topic and its not easy. I hope that in the future more automatism could be implemented in CMS Systems. Hope that helps.

I built my own CMS.  It's liberating and far less painful than trying to reverse engineer a pre-existing platform to do only what's needed without carrying excess baggage for things that are not.  The upside is streamlined code that makes sense to work with.  I'm in the process of building another CMS.  And I'm taking the lessons learned from previous ones.  

Whether you build your own CMS or use an off-the-shelf system,  make a thorough list of what's required, prioritize each item and describe what the user experience should be for admins, staff, guests, members, new users, returning users, customers, etc... 

Organize data sufficiently to accomplish the various tasks. There's nothing worse than building an app and finding out afterwards that your database logic is ill-equipped to meet all the project goals.  Take your time with this as it's  critically important.

If I had to change anything about my current CMS it would be how the product catalog prints. The online catalog is populated from a MySQL database.  Ideally, that data should be ported into a catalog layout in a desktop publishing app.  That's something I haven't done yet.