Blog or static

If you have 200+ pages of real content, organization is important. If you use a blog you'll need to make use of categories to organize content or if you go static you'll need to essentially make categories. The standard chronological format of a regular blog sucks for sites this large.

Static is nice in that you can get exactly the look you like, blog is nice in that write, categorize, save, done. To people putting up 5+ sites a week this can be a real time saver. If you are incrementally creating one giant site, static isn't bad at all in most cases except it can be an issue if you want to easily update all the pages. There are ways around this using includes, either server side, or php that will save you time.

I've tended to go static over a blog. (by the way when you say blog you could really mean any other content management system like joomla or drupal too). Static sites don't have the overhead in computing power that a cms driven site does. That may or may not matter. If you are on $8/month shared hosting and your site gets a lot of traffic, it will matter. That same site if static probably wouldn't be an issue.

Security - static wins hands down, especially over Wordpress.

The blog or build article by Ken Evoy will help you understand about structure.

Static is no doubt more work, but in my opinion has many more advantages.

for me, I like using wordpress for the convenience.

I do write my own themes so I'm not trapped with having to use a generic blog layout. HTML and CSS are the same no matter if you are using a static site or a CMS like wordpress so you're only limited by your own coding capabilities.

SEO is also not an issue. I don't use any SEO plug-ins and have everything set-up to work according to my needs through the theme itself. I can do pretty much everything something like all-in-one seo would do but I control it through the control panel.

I have a couple of sites that have 200+ pages of content and I haven't noticed any major problems in performance but these sites are not huge traffic draws (hundres of uniques / hundreds to low thousands total hits a day) so I can't make any qualified conclusions of knowing at what point the code bloat of a blog is going to make a noticeable difference. Hosting is also going to play a part in this.

I also like the accessibility to a wide variety of plug-ins to do additional neato things.

I haven't had any security issues, but that just means the hacker mafia hasn't found me. I guess I'm laying low in a sea of blogs. I've also tweaked my sites to hide information like wordpress version to make hacking a little more difficult.

But, when it's all said and done... I like being able to log-in, add my content, upload my images, hit post and call it a day.

Wordpress also has some useful options like post-dating posts so I can write 20 posts and have them auto-posting over the next few weeks or months, essentially allowing me to set-up and have a blog running on auto-pilot while I move on to the next site.

It's really a webmaster by webmaster case and what you want and need out of a site. I don't think there is a right or wrong way to do it.