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for smaller sites, movable type or word press are very easy and customizable options.
If you don't want to pay and aren't handling large page numbers, CMS Made Simple is free and easily handles a 60 page site. [snip]. That's all I've used it for so don't know how well it scales. So far so good. I'd have no problems considering it for smallish sites, say fewer than 200 pages. I like its straightforward backend. And it's very easy to install, customize and configure. CMS Made Simple also can offer SE friendly URLs if your server includes mod_rewrite. That's on Apache.
Anyone looking for a SE friendly CMS should make sure your server has this capacity and your CMS offers the feature. It's pretty common and shouldn't cost any more.
You can demo dozens of open source content management systems at [snip]
[edited by: pageoneresults at 10:50 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed URI References - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
If I had a full time developer: typo3 would be my answer.
Since I do not: I am happy with articlelive, still brand new and has a bunch of bugs, but it is the most customizable "out of box" CMS I have found. The developers made nothing related to the frontend hardcoded, so it is really awesome. Too bad making templates is a major hassle.
Mambo is crap from SEO point of view. it does not allow H1 (at least I did not find such a template). So what are you talking about?
Keep looking :) , there is an advanced SEO module that you can buy to make your urls friendly, its easy to customize templates/css if you know what you doing.
From the sounds of it, you don't!