There were static site generators in 2003. Dreamweaver and FrontPage were the big names, but there were many many more.

With the tooling of the day, simple tasks (ie - adding a new page to a main menu) were error prone and time consuming. Some early ssgs offered templates and includes, but they were complicated for nontechnical people to setup and use.

Version control sucked so in the wild, most Dreamweaver sites lived on one person's computer. If that computer's hard drive crashed, panic ensued.