My site at www.wolfmother.net is just edited through HTML. It has no CMS at all. I've been thinking about moving it to a Wordpress based site. What kind of impact would it have on my SE rankings, if any? Google loves the site it seems, it ranks very highly for most keywords. I guess I'm just somewhat nervous about affecting that. Obviously I would keep the sub page URLs the same as they are now. Cheers.
If you can get away with keeping the same url's on all the sub pages, then it should have minimal effect on rankings. If you change the url's and you properly do a 301 redirect to the new pages, everything should be fine again after a few weeks / months. Either way, there really no big reason not to do it, if it will help you manage the site and make it better in the long run.
Yeah, the big benefit I see is increasing the number of indexed pages. With blogs, every post and category is a page indexed. At the moment I only have about 6. I definitely see the benefits (not least, ease of updating!).