Comment by dasil003

See my reply to bryanlarsen... If there is no plan for skilled maintenance down the line then I always refer clients to hosted services like wordpress.com or squarespace. I used to do a lot of custom sites a decade ago with a mix of raw PHP, Drupal, Wordpress and Rails. Honestly it's all turned into a maintenance nightmare for people who didn't have "a guy" to call (I couldn't be this guy anymore after I joined my current startup). If you were determined to go down the custom route then I don't necessarily think Rails was wrong, but just that your client needs to understand up front that this will run for some amount of time and then inevitably need maintenance.