Why CMS?!

All the Content Management Systems just seem so blog-like. Why would you use any of them as opposed to writing your own code? They all just seem so restrictive in what I can do with them and they all feel like a freaking blog. But I know they're useful for clients who don't know code so basically the question is how can I use a CMS to build a site that is as good as my hand written static sites but still has the functionality of and user-friendliness of a CMS?

Not sure what CMS's you have looked into so far, but "restrictive" and "blog-like" doesn't sound like an actual CMS. I'm a web developer myself and have been working with Drupal for the last few years for pretty much all my projects. The advantage is, that you get the basic skeletton for a website with a clean install of a CMS (creating pages, performing tasks, themes, user accounts, ...) and can focus on programming what you really need. If I have a client, who needs a certain functionality, I can usually start writing a module in a local installation of the CMS and when everything is done, deliver a module that can easily be installed.

Also things like content types and permissions make your life a lot easier when it's already available. Would be almost crazy to start something from scratch...

I'm using joomla and maybe I'm just looking at it in the wrong way. I don't know it's freaking confusing to me. I am very much just a designer not a developer and I'm comfortable with html, css, and a little bit of javascript and jqery but I can't wrap my brain around Joomla! and I don't know why. It seems so easy.

Okay so I've worked with Joomla for the past week or so and I have to say my immediate reaction was very unfair to Joomla. I've now made my own template and started putting together a website and it's coming together nicely. I think what got me was the terminology of Joomla. When you're talking about articles and catagories and everything just feels like it's supposed to be a blog. but when I took a step back and realized that articles linked to menus just make new pages and catagories are basically used for organization and I've made my own theme that works the way I actually need it to work..... it all feels much better and I'm very happy with it. So basically thanks ronaldroe for kinda talking me into not giving up on joomla too soon.

Joomla is a great content management system, albeit a little difficult to get your head round if CMSs are new to you. As you said, it's best to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. As a web developer the use of a content management system is sometimes essential as clients want to be able to edit sections of their website. It's generally not a good idea to let them 'loose' with the source code so by allocating user accounts and specific areas the client can happily keep their websites up to date. If you have any questions about Joomla then give me a shout

Joomla, Drupal are very nice CMS that are very powerful and can be used to deploy a very large variety (yes even Blogs) of websites. It's all a matter of how you structure your template and the modules that you use.

Now on the other side, I've been suing Wordpress, specifically a blog software, as a CMS to deploy numerous websites for clients. They find the interface and ease of use to be great and some clients even have made simple modifications on their own..

All of these software have significant amount of development behind them and some have taken years to get where they are right now, so writing your own from scratch is really counter-productive..