1) They ask about it, which may be because they know a little bit about it. For example they tried to DIY it and failed, or they have a half finished version another developer did. Or they want to know how big the market is to get someone else to finish the project if you don't pan out for them.

Or they just have heard some vague stuff that they have read on blogs "Is Wordpress or Drupal better for SEO?" as if the choice of platform is going to rocket them to the front page of google...

2) I ask about it. Because sometimes they already have hosting that they want to use, in which case obviously you need to make sure the technology is going to fit that. The hardest thing sometimes is trying to persuade someone that the uber-cheap hosting provider they've chosen sucks and they'd have a better experience is they paid a few more $ a month.

I've been burned by this before, developed a system for a client. Installed it on their server and then found out they don't support PHP5 or PDO or anything even remotely modern and won't enable it for you.

We have a strong policy about advising clients like this up-front something like: "Of course we're happy for you to manage/engage your own web hosting. Are you going to be using them or us for first level support in case of problems? We're happy either way, and our usual $150/hr hourly rate, but if you'd like us to be the first point of contact you'll need to supply us with details of your support contact at the hosting company, and authority to incur support cost with them when required."

I simply inform them in a candid way what the problem is, and if they're reasonable they'll probably switch services or find a way to accomodate. Otherwise if I detect a tendency for cheapness, then I know there either needs to be a longer discussion or that they are in fact a red flag.

Sometimes it's also a pretty good discussion early on to help to start getting the feel of the type of respect and consideration potentials clients may hold for the consultant's advice.

Eons before I got into web dev, I was hocking HP printers in brick and mortar tech stores. One of the things I was taught that I would never forget is that you sell the experience, not the product. It's not an all in one printer. It's a way to get the photos from your vacation off your camera and onto paper. Or a way to privately print your own photos. Products don't exist to be a list of features (if they're good products). They exist to solve problems. The best ones don't even need to be "sold."

I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.

I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.

*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.

That Mac comes with Facetime and iTunes. If the PC laptop comes packaged with software, it's generally not the PC manufacturer's own, and they can't guarantee your laptop will be compatible with another.

Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.

Too bad in retail, the salesman is pretty much gone after the sale. Then you're stuck because the benefit of the technology doesn't actually work in practice because people have specific needs AND some processes are better than others.

So I'm not a huge buyer into the benefits sell. I think it causes people to get lazy about what they need to know about their product and I think it also puts them into assumption mode about their customer, that they don't think deeply, and that they are oblivious to any useful technical details. And those of us customers who have gotten burned before rarely forget it.

With that said, I think leading with the benefits is great, the trouble is, when everyone leads with the same general benefit "it will make x easier" it becomes time to again leverage something to set yourself apart.

Famous example: 'we want GPS'. Turns out the need is for navigation by the blind inside buildings (=> poor signal, if any, and a need for one meter or so resolution) or for finding entrances to buildings (that data did not exist 10 years ago and probably doesn't even today. Say, you get out of a bus at a large hospital. Where is its entrance door? Can you even tell what side of the road it is on?)

Sometimes technologies get attributed magical qualities that you cannot get out of people's heads.

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/floorplans/

Sometimes I wish I had more freedom of choice with technology.

WordPress has become popular enough that many smaller businesses who need a (new) website and do a few minutes of research often come across it. Most of what they read tells them that it's the best platform for their website. They don't really know why, or what WordPress does, but they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.

The same thing used to happen with Flash. Clients would come to me insistent on having a Flash website, or at the very least, a Flash intro page. This one there does come with an inherent problem. Thankfully, this one has gone to the wayside.

From my personal experience, small businesses really want to just be able to infrequently add or update content. Most of the time, WordPress seems like a huge hammer for small nails.

Can anyone recommend a light-weight system that allows the "regular folks" add or update content without the extras (such as changing "themes", etc)?

If you want something lighter yet, I highly recommend http://getkirby.com/ (no affiliation, just a fan). It's very lightweight, runs on a variation of MarkDown, highly flexible, and unlike most of the "static site generators" out there it has a minimal panel for adding and editing content. The $39 per site license is well worth it.

How is the programming model out of date? I am looking at getting into it via the new v6.0. It has ASP.NET MVC support but the CMS itself is still WebForms.

static html is the way to go these days.

I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.