A client wrote, "Rich, after hearing what you said about WordPress I asked my web developer if he was using it to build my website. He said, 'No, I'm not using WordPress. Since this is for a class on web development techniques, a system like WordPress that does a lot of that for you, wouldn't be acceptable in my class.' Rich, I hope this doesn't cause you any problems."
My answer?
Short term, as long as he is ready to program and design ways to do things in the website, fine. It will be slow, buggy, and a security risk at first, but that's normal for software development.
Long term, WordPress provides a very flexible platform with thousands of extensions available to make it do more.WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites and works like magic at getting listed in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. The WordPress team constantly updates it for security reasons making it a very secure system. It's used by NBC Sports, CNN, Time, UPS, DowJones, Sports Illustrated, Atlantic Monthly, Intuit, TechCrunch, LA Times, BBC, NFL, and some 60 million other websites.
Learn more about it here: Wikipedia