I'd say your best bet is to check out some of the high quality themes at http://themeforest.net -- if you don't want to deal with html / css the wordpress themes are really easy to setup and look amazing.
Thanks so much for the advice! My primary concern with Wordpress is that it has been around long enough that it could actually be harder to set up because of out of date tutorials, and that I've been told it's got a lot of security issues. I also have a vague horrible memory of trying to install it in 2006 or 2007 and it being a disaster to customize... but I don't want to hold that against it in 2014. On the other hand, I've been told that because it's a blogging platform (is it really?) it's easier to update content through the web interface, and that makes it get higher rankings on Google (for now).
I don't know enough to evaluate any of these claims or worries; do you think that they're still true? I certainly absolutely positively have no problem paying for a high quality theme, I'm much more worried about creating a mess on my server that will take dozens of hours of attention to clean up.
These days, Wordpress is quite secure for most uses - especially a simple corporate site. Here's how I'd go about it-
1. Buy theme from themeforest or similar.
2. Buy a shared hosting account from webfaction or similar (less than $10/month)
3. Use their one-click Wordpress installer to install Wordpress
4. Install theme in Wordpress install.
Wordpress is actually not that hard to setup these days, but maybe a better approach is to start with hosted WP (e.g. wpengine) just to get the site up and running asap, and then later transition out into your own WP install when you have the time/resources.
For what you're trying to do, I'd definitely bet on a hosted CMS + a nice theme. You'll get a pretty website that's easy to manage, and it will cost very little in terms of time and money.
