Victor Kane wrote:
But now, your clients don't want websites. Nor do you if you want a decent professional blog, capable of creating a portfolio content type and listing it and theming it with views.
They want website applications. Which means you need a development framework to develop with, not an off-the-shelf-solution to stick somewhere. Which means, to be productive, you need to get involved with a framework, make reusable components of your own with it, get involved in its community, know which modules to use, because you can't do this alone. Which means you need to solve once and for all your administration processes on all your customer sites, and teach your customers best practices on how to upgrade Drupal and modules, or provide maintenance services, etc.
So, you can be a dilettant, and think in terms of half-assed solutions for half-assed websites, or you can be a website application developer who works with a CMS framework they have gotten to know well over the months and years, and with which they have become productive. Which is not to say you never whip up a few well formed A List Apart style HTML+CSS for a small static site, or that you never install WordPress for you uncle's blog (he's not going to update it tho).
Jeez man - the guy wants to market his environmental compliance services, not build wizzy interactive web sites. It's about getting the right message across, in the most cost-effective way; not about bells and whistles.