Dear Client: Please don't apologise for your website

Today I was on the phone with the lawyer who'd helping me overhaul my service contract.  Every business niche is unique, and software development may well be a special snowflake--what with its dependencies on software written by someone else and all.  (For future reference:  When civilisation falls because Skynet or The Matrix or The Borg hacked in through a NSA/GCHQ/CSIS/Whomever-mandated crypto. back-door, it's totally not my fault--got it?  Also?  Don't say I didn't tell you so.)

As the chat wound down, I asked him about some of the other services mentioned on his website.  At which point he rather apologetically explained that the site had been done in Wordpress.  As if the only legit. websites are done in artisanal HTML5.  Hand-coded exclusively from free-range organic fair-trade ones and zeroes.  Or something.  I'm not entirely sure I grok the motivation behind the disclaimer, frankly.

Well, maybe I do...a little.  My guess is that it's a revenant of the pre-WYSIWYG* (e.g. pre-Dreamweaver) days of making web pages.  You know, back when web development shops could call themselves "boutiques," with a straight face...and nobody snickered.

Folks, seriously-and-for-realz now:  If I could care less how the actual bytes of anyone's website were generated, I'd be a web browser.  What (as a consumer and geek) I do care about is:

• Do I know what your organisation is even about?  Because, in the hands of an appropriately-qualified idiot, any publishing platform can spew fluent marketing gibberish with a legalese accent.  (Or vice-versa.)  Mere technology is no match for this species of idiot...much less a committee of idiots.
• How long has it been since the website content was updated?  Similarly, no technology in the world will save you from not caring enough to update the content when your organisation changes or has something new to say.
• (And speaking of updates...)  Pretty-please have a plan in place to update the underlying software.  Unless you know that the person who set it up had to make some hacks under the hood, there's no reason maintenance updates should break anything.  (And if hacks were made, that should have been addressed up front.)  Otherwise, you're leaving yourself wide open for an embarrassing security breach.  Don't do that.

In other words, it has everything to do with content and management and precisely bupkis to do with technology.  Wordpress and rival CMSes** like Drupal and Joomla are perfectly valid publishing platforms.  Just pick one.  Keep it in use with info. that's useful to your audience.  And, for the cold-eyed love of Cthulu, keep it up to scratch with security updates.  Then you'll have nothing--less than nothing, in fact--to be apologetic about.

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* WYSIWYG (pronounced "Whiz-ee-wig") is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get."

** CMS == "Content Management System."