Over a year ago I discovered the beauty of Drupal and the amazing things that could be done with it, and typically without doing any major programming. Modules like CCK, Views and the helpers for these modules make developing dynamic websites a snap. You will most likely need a bit of knowledge in terms of html/css (modifying templates to suite your needs) but in my experience I've had to do only a very moderate amount of actual PHP coding. If anything, I could add some specific behaviour to the page through the use of javascript.

After building the UI for a reasonably sized web application (which happens to be very heavy in javascript), I found that with around 40 JavaScript files being included into the page and the size of all of the files together caused for some poor load times on anything but a very fast internet connection. A common technique to solve issues such as this is to use a JavaScript compression technique such as js-min, YUI compressor, dojo compressor, and others. Because the YUI compressor gives very good results (better than the others in the tests I saw) and is very easy to use, I chose it.