I pretty much know something like 0.1% programming and have very little artistic skill but decided to have fun with building websites anyways with html using frontpage and dreamweaver. They came out alright as i used a template then hacked the crap out of it. It took a lot of work still and gave up for a while. Then i decided to make a prank site and used moveable type first and tried a few other blogging software, ending up with wordpress because it was more flexible than moveable type at the time and much easier to use. I think this was version 1.5. I still have that blog up somewhere on a free server, oh man was it easy to use compared to today. Later i got a job at a local web design firm. They had their own CMS based on .Net. It was actually quite good, quite easy, and powerful as hell. They charged $4k to use it. I wouldn't know what to do with it even if i had access to the code. I played with some other CMSes while there, drupal being one that gained steam while a bunch of others. Oh man are they hard to use. It takes quite a while to figure them out. I gave up on websites yet again. A few friends needed a site so i fired up trusty wordpress, now at 3.0. Wow did they change a lot. Stuff that should have been there from the beginning are finally there. Its now 30x more complicated, trying to teach someone WP3 almost defeated the original reason why i chose wordpress, it had a simple backend. But its still a good bit easier to use than most other stuff and I know it well enough to hack most things up. And the themes/plugins jesus, try even searching for a theme for moveable type on google, i came up with 2 ugly ones. And Britney Spears website comes up as Movable types featured showcase? That can't be good...

WP makes thing easier and harder for me at the same time. Well I guess its like money, the more you have the more problems it brings. As for the backend, But try WP 3.1, it adds a top bar that was so useful from a plugin i used since 1.5. Also wordcamp rocks.