I’m pretty sure Whole Foods uses a CMS for their local events calendar, that said, a big ass asterisk to this: I could be wrong, and if I am, oops. But, let’s assume I’m right. I’m guessing they use a CMS because whomever wrote their local events wasn’t paying attention. The “Events” header was listed two or three times, there were typos in the event listing, the dates were not in any discernible order, some events were repeated, and old dates hadn’t been taking down. I say this not to pick on Whole Foods — anyone that knows me also knows I’m a huge snob and I refuse to shop at Safeway or King Soopers when I’m cooking. I love Whole Foods, I think they do a great job.

1. If you’re used to publishing online, you typically make less mistakes. I have a lot of clients who use CMS. As of the time of writing this, every one of my clients using a CMS has errors on their site. Designers aren’t perfect, I’m not detail-oriented, I typically don’t proof-read the stuff that is given to me to be posted on my clients’ websites, but if there’s a big red underline beneath a word, I’ll typically correct the spelling. I do consider it to be part of my job to keep a site organized. So, the two events on the Whole Foods site, for instance — I would have caught that. I think another big part of this is that if clients are sending me copy, they write it Word (versus a web browser, which is how most people write original drafts for a CMS). When someone writes their web-copy in a word processing application it seems like they take it a little more seriously, so spelling and grammar mistakes have less of a chance of slipping through the cracks.
2. “Design” never stops. Presumably, you’re hiring a graphic designer because you feel that they are helping you solve a problem (navigation, branding, UI, whatever). A designer is spending a great deal of time finessing your site so that it’s easy to use, the pages are laid out well, the look fits the aesthetic of your company, etc. On this note, it’s not like you can take a page with 500 words and change that to 1500 words and assume it will look fine. If you look at the home page of hospicecareonline.org, you’ll see that there are headers for Events, Welcome, News, Thank You, and Donate. These sections are in constant flux (and should be), so the page is constantly being fine-tuned. If you just barf 1500 words onto a page without graphics or any other type style, it will look bad. What you can do for “design” via a CMS is limited, and even if it wasn’t, isn’t that why you hired a designer in the first place?
3. There’s no such thing as “fool-proof”. You can break the shell of the CMS; you can take your entire site down; you can create things that don’t work on multiple platforms; sooner or later, you will have that person updating your site that uses 6 fonts and 23 colors within three paragraphs; the same person will use stolen, copyrighted photography (not out of maliciousness, just ignorance); and inevitably the site you paid good money for will need to be thrown out and redone from scratch.
4. All CMS require training to some degree. You will forget how to use it. It will never be as easy as it can be. Now more than ever I’m running into clients who think that editing online content isn’t any different than Word. It’s a lot different, and even the simplest of CMS are still quite complex. Even if you edit your site every day, you’re going to run into constant, ongoing issues with something you don’t know how to do. Or, you think you know how to do it, but you might be doing it wrong.
5. A “good CMS” is an oxymoron. In addition to all of the above, I still don’t think the perfect CMS has been built yet. I think EE and Modx are the best two out, but I’ve a long list of complaints about both of them.

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I’d still say that we can do a CMS for you. But I’ve had clients do a retainer maintenance contract and clients who manage their own site. Without exception, the clients who manage their own sites pay more in the long and short run, they have a lesser quality product, and within three years, their site is in such bad repair with typos, band-aids, major UI and navigational errors, poor choices in photography, and so on, that they would be better served by taking their site down than they are by keeping it up.