What do I want from a CMS?

My requirements for a Content Management System are driven by two primary factors: I need something that my clients can use, on their own, without my help every time they make a change and I personally need something that lets me concentrate on content, not the mechanics of generating the site.

My clients are reasonably sophisticated computer users. All of them are familiar with the basic operation of Office applications, however, only one has advanced training and experience beyond being a computer user. In general, they want and need to focus on making their particular business work, not on taming the network or learning Javascript or Perl. They don't care about how or why their site works, only that it does.

I, on the other hand, am a geek. I'm easily distracted by the mechanics of just about everything. My need is to have something that doesn't need to be fiddled with. A tool that simply lets me write an article and turn it into a web page.

I've played with every piece of software I could find that resembles a CMS and written brief reviews as I learned each one's capabilities. I've also experimented with batch files, Excel, Word, Access, FileMaker, Javascript, Zope, Frontier, FrontPage, etc. Some of these tools have great capabilities, but none have the combination of simplicity for the user and sophistication for the tweaker that I'm looking for.

With all this in mind, here are my requirements in no particular order:

• Has to run on a reasonably powerful WinTel machine. My clients use everything from Windows 95 thru XP on machines that range from P133 up.
• Reasonably priced for a single seat license.
• Not server specific. I've got a couple intranets running on ancient machines using a simple REBOL server that only serves HTML.
• Simple user interface. Needs to look/act like a typical Windows application. Users don't want to learn a new piece of software, especially if it's radically different from what they use on a daily basis.
• Word processing features such as bold, italics, font selection, alignment, etc. Does not need as many features as Word, more like WordPad. Of course, drag & drop, cut & paste, and picture/hyperlink capabilities.
• Ability to apply a template to the entire site. I'm happy making the template in some other app, I just want to decide on a design and be able to stuff all the content into it. This is mostly a client need. Many of them have FrontPage and can create their own design.
• Ideally, one-button publishing. I can teach clients how to ftp, but don't want to. It's too easy for them to screw something up!
• Navigation that updates as new content is added.
• A sitemap that updates as new content is added.
• Ability to easily insert specific metatag "description" and "keywords" per page.
• The whole application needs to reside on the client pc. None of my clients can install apps on the server and IMHO, don't need to.
• All the files, graphics, zips, whatever need to be part of the "project". Any changes or additions are automatically included when the site is ftp'd to the server.