People who insist on reinventing the wheel

I never cease to be amazed of how some people's vanity seems to surface when they commission a website.  They basically want to create everything from scratch, thereby giving them the feeling that the website is "designer made", much like fashion addicts can't wear off-the-shelf clothes.  These people think that any prepackaged solution is far beneath them and their grand website.  I came across one of them the other day.  He wanted a website with a range of CMS capabilities.  I of course suggested using Joomla, and if there was a thing Joomla did not cover, then develop a component that did cover it.

Custom made means big risk 

No, that wasn't good enough.  He wanted a CMS (Content Management System) specially made just for his website.  Yes, you read me correctly - he wanted a new CMS built from scratch to satisfy his needs, and for a budget hopefully below £4000.

Now come on, it's time to get real here.  A good CMS is a big task to code.  Furthermore, the one sure thing about software is that coding produces bugs.  These bugs can take several generations of the software to root out, by which time some new ones have been introduced.

This is so silly that I lack words to describe it.  There exist several perfectly adequate Open Source CMS's, Joomla among them, that anyone can take and build extensions on.  That is a much safer and not the least, much cheaper route.  Why reinvent the wheel?  Do not commission anything to be built from scratch unless there is a specific need to do so.