No Problem. WordPress is popular because of a few reasons:

1. It’s Free
2. It’s very easy to use (about as simple as sending an email from gmail or yahoo mail)
3. It’s constantly being updated to stay modern and useful
4. It has extensions, plugins and widgets to allow you to do just about anything you want to your website.

Because of the popularity of wordpress, many web designers have begun to design themes as templates that people can start from, so that it’s easier to get up and running quickly. I’ve personally become a fan of the Genesis Framework, and using themes from a company called studiopress (http://studiopress.com), because they look very professional, they come with video tutorials on how to set things up, and they are bundled with excellent tech support in the forums area. I’m currently using the Associates theme for my home page: http://avchdprosolutions.com

Choosing not to use wordpress will not hurt your SEO efforts as long as your using another program or Content Management System that produces clean XHTML compliant code, a clean meta tag structure, and pages that are easily crawlable by the search engines.

Some people swear by hand coding everything themselves, while others prefer wordpress, or drupal, or joomla, or Dreamweaver or something. There are a lot of choices. If SEO is your main concern then learning the key factors that get your site ranked well in the search engines should be your first step. I’ve learned a LOT from the courses taught by James Martell, you can find his content at http://affiliatemarketersbootcamp.com

I hope that helps.

Chris

Thanks for your thoughts. I haven’t used Builder or Headway myself. I’ve worked with the Options Framework, and I’ve seen some sites using genesis framework lay out in a very clean format.

Bill K