Open source content management software

Hello out there!
I am willing to create my company's web site. However, my coding knowledge probably will not lead to great results, especially when it comes to ranking techniques (i mean the dos and donts to get good ranking on google).
I have been proposed a web site by a professional company based on a content management software. The thing is : although looking good, it is way too expensive at the moment.

I think I can take care about the contents, graphics and so on. However, the pure structure of the web site is surely very important and pure coding is too much work for me right now. I think a good content management software would help me there, and it could also give me the possibility to leave the maintenance of the site to less advanced users...

Are there free (open source?) content management programs? Which one would you recommend?

Search ranking is the most important thing to me, far before design possibilities, so the way the software builds the site corresponding to up-to-date standards seems crucial.

Any ideas ?
Thanx in advance
Fred

Yes, there are open source cms ... I didn't know there were any that weren't :o but I don't pay much attention to commercial software. Check the first page or three in this forum. There have been some discussion recently. Also, play around at this link (http://www.opensourcecms.com/).

As far as search ranking, content is king. Crappy content == crappy site ranking. Everything else is secondary - important, but secondary.

Joomla

I like wordpres.. I know it is meant to be for blogging but you really can use it for any type of website.

Any CMS can do you justice if you take the time to really learn it. Once you pick a system that you like and can use, check around for good plug-ins or tutorials about SEF URLs, SEO, and other ranking help.

All in all, just as tomws says, content is king, so people still will only find your site if there is something on there worth looking at.

There are tons of free Content Management Systems available on the Internet - just look at any script repository for an example, like http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Content_Management/index.html.

The most popular is Wordpress. Joomla is nice too. Plone (Python/Zope) is extremely feature-rich and action packed. Drupal is another one that you might consider.

thank you everyone for the very quick replies.
after looking around and reading user comments, i think i might go for drupal... this might be overkill and i hope it won't be too difficult to set up, but it seems to be rather bug-free and flexible. we'll see...

as far as content / ranking is concerned, of course content is king. but if you type for example "bakery nyc", you get lots of relevant sites, but some are better ranked as others, which probably makes their success. i am roughly in this situation.

fred