Completely agree on this for small websites! I use "oldschool" HTML, CSS and simple PHP includes for stuff like navigation, footer, etc. It's easy to maintain and fast. My workflow looks like this: Buying template/theme at e.g. Wrapbootstrap.com and then moving reuseable stuff like navigation, breadcrumbs, footer into PHP snippets and include them. Finally using mod_rewrite via .htaccess for nice links. Deployment / syncing is done by a simple BASH script which uses rsync command.