1. site, even dynamic, database-driven, etc. should be compiled "off-line"
as much as possible.

2. there is "source tree" and "target tree" (the latter is actual content 
served to the web clients). 

3. content separated from presentation as much as possible. basically, all
html's generated from simple files containing text and basic
html formatting, with all visible and non-visible (like meta tags) 
decorations added by including different perl modules representing different
pages layout (currently there are only two - homepage::simple.pm and 
homepage::hairy.pm, both derived from homepage::base.pm). data 
(like list of some items) usually stored in perl hashes.

4. there is a build directory with a top "master" Makefile. 
build directory repeats partially the structure of the site, for those
directories which should be processed not by general rules.
files used in top directory and in each "special" directory: 
4.1. specials (list of files needed special processing or no processing at all;
     may be absent)
4.2. rules.mk (build rules)
4.3. build_list_targets (generates list of targets from the list of sources;
     if this script is absent, one from the top build directory is taken)

5. on each invocation of make:
5.1. list of target files is calculated according to the list of source files 
     and build rules (sort of "reverse makefile processing")
5.2. target tree braught in a sync with source tree (necessary directories
     created, unnecesary files and directories deleted)
5.3. each file in source tree build according to build rules:
     html files generated from .phtml or .php, image files are just copied, 
     java classes are compiled, etc.
5.4. all html files are post-processed by a script which does things like 
     converting russian translit to koi8, inserting missing image size 
     attributes, doing some fine html tuning according to my (current) taste
     (see above), etc.