Simple static sites are great ideas. Writing HTML/CSS and not relying on a WYSIWYG back-end editor is an awesome way to work, especially if you're using a templating engine to generate the static content as mentioned here. However, in my experience the people paying to have websites built or your in-house marketing team maintaining and updating the company website, making sure the SEO is up-to-snuff, etc. can't do these things. They don't want to learn how to do these things. The unfortunate truth is that more times than not they require Wordpress or something like it to do their job.