CMS

The separation is the whole point. A page template decides layout; the CMS holds the articles, projects, listings or team members that flow through it. Add a new article and it appears formatted correctly, because the formatting lives in the template, not in the article. Without a CMS every new item is a new page built by hand.

CMS platforms differ mainly in who they are for. WordPress is a general-purpose CMS with an enormous plugin ecosystem and the maintenance burden that comes with it. Webflow's CMS is built into the design tool, which means the content model and the templates are designed together by the same person. Headless systems provide content through an API and leave display to a separate front end.

The decision that matters more than the platform is the content model: what types of content exist, what fields each has and how they relate. A CMS with a poor model makes every new page a workaround; one with a good model makes the twentieth case study as easy to publish as the first.