Does it matter in SEO rankings if a site is developed in html or via some CMS (like wordpress)? Will the rankings be different assuming it is the exact same content?
Not really. Assuming you put in adequate efforts, both sites can rank for the keywords you want them to rank for.
Wordpress provides many features for its blogs, in fact it has faster crawling capacity with automatic update of RSS feed. By doing same feature manually (RSS Update regularly), u also can good like wordpress. Its not a big concern. RSS plays a great role.
No difference in how they rank in SEO. I would recommend using Wordpress or another Content Management System though. They make editing a lot user friendly if you ever wanted to sell or get someone else to do some writing for your website. Then you don't need someone that knows HTML to add content. It's hard to find good writers, it's extremely hard to find any that know HTML.
They can both be great in terms of SEO, but I think WordPress is easier for SEO because it creates search engine optimized pages by itself. If your manually creating a web page you have to do the SEO work by yourself.
If you can develop the HTML site well it'll be suitable for SEO ranking, but using wordpress you can do that process very fast. You can save a lot of development time.
Thanks for the replies. I will go for the SEO based site as everyone appears to agree that its more easier to maintain in the long run and ranks as well as a static html site