I would like to add a cms to some of my website pages. Is this possible and what would the best cms be?
Yes, it's possible. WE can not say best cms. Each has different and unique functionality and so selection will be fully depends upon your requirement. Just see official site for drupal and joomla.
there are many open source cms scripts out there! depends on what you want to do...you might want Drupal or you might want DocuWiki, etc.
Best? What if it is so expensive you can't afford it? What if it is so complex you can not operate it? What is the best flavor of ice cream. CMS selection depends on the needs of the project.
I think WordPress is one of the best CMS. But (currently) not for a big community and professional online-shop. For a online-shop I recommend Magento.
I second WordPress as a "cms". It's easy to learn, easy to use and incredibly powerful for SEOs. With only a few plugins, you've got a rockin search engine friendly site.
Exactly, and you can make WordPress (it is really just a blog) to a fully CMS website with a front page (a.k.a home page).
Wordpress because - Many plugins which make it easier to do almost anything with wordpress - large community, more support - loads of themes - easy to use (people are familiar with wordpress) - upgrades come quite often
If you have an inkling that your site may develop and have different functionality requirements in the future, then you ought to consider Drupal. The very fact that you want to hook your current HTML pages into the CMS, indicates to me that you may very well have some special requirements. In this case Drupal will be more appropriate than Wordpress or Joomla, which are excellent CMS, but are narrower in terms of functionality they address. In any case, hooking your current html pages in Drupal is possible, not necessarily easy the first time around, and will absolutely derive no benefits of the CMS, nor make the information available to the CMS. So there usually is little point in doing that. The best way is probably to see if the CMS can provide close enough to the functionality that your HTML pages currently give or whether it may be easily modified to do so. Again, Drupal has quite a bit more than a thousand modules available as free add-ons, granted some of different quality, but it may very well be possible that one of them, with little or even without modifications may fit your needs. Enjoy, MidGe48