There are plugins for Wordpress that will bake the front end of the site in to static HTML and push it up to an S3 bucket for hosting. Seems like a decent solution to me.
On HN you are generally expected to 'get started', rather than insulting projects like that without expanding.
I would actually say, though I vastly prefer say Jekyll over WordPress, that generating a static site from a WordPress site probably works pretty well and gets you a very mature CMS UI for your users.
Doing it that way round is probably preferable and better understood at this point than the newer solutions that are trying to bolt CMS backends onto Jekyll sites (CodeCannon, Prose.io etc).
Fair enough, I half expected to get called out. My original comment suggested that what was needed (particularly for non-developers) was a "nice clean user-friendly front end". Wordpress, although incredibly popular, is IMHO, a usability nightmare and does not fit the bill. It is one of the least intuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I have recently spent some time searching twitter for people having problems with wordpress, and I know i'm not alone.
In any case, for the websites I am talking about (small non-technical businesses in particular), wordpress is overkill and operates at a higher layer of abstraction then necessary. Also, such a solution has almost all the disadvantages of wordpress (Finding wordpress hosting [These guys are not going to have their own on-premise wordpress install], setting up and configuring wordpress, keeping wordpress and plugins up-to-date), for very little advantage (slightly more consistent load times? ). Just putting a CDN in front of it would get you most of the way there.
It's also hard to recommend a good wordpress host [The exception to this is sandstorm, which is amazing and does the wordpress->static thing exactly right]. Managed wordpress is what you want, but it's bloody expensive (again, IMO, but these kinds of customers are generally cheap). Anything more hands-on than fully manged hosting is a lot of work and maintenance for something these people are realistically NOT going to use on a daily basis.
I think Wix and Squarespace serve a very much needed part of the market, and I wish I could point people at an elegant open source solution that would allow "normal" people to have affordable websites backed by S3 or Github pages (like us developers enjoy).
