Cougar,
Have you been spying on my meetings? Think yourself lucky you didn't take the contract, because the CEO who showed no real interest in the project during the spec, but agreed to it anyway will then turn up at a design review meeting tell everyone they've got the whole thing wrong and they've misunderstood the spec.
I sat in a meeting where the designer tried to get some understanding of the "brand" and the CEO told him he was making it all too complicated and I just want a "simple clean site, its not really about brand, we want to communicate with the customer not sell them product!"; a month later with the almost finished product in front of us I then found myself trying to crawl under the table as the CEO told him "its a bit basic isn't it? for what we are paying i'd expect some design input, something to make us stand out from the crowd, and its not 'salesy' enough!".
However I have to say you web developers are guilty of making stuff too complex. 3-4 days of a designer should easily produce the sort of spec that the OP was talking about... especially since most of the time you don't write any content. Off the shelf shared server, set up word press, pick starting point template, make cup of coffee, tweak template, have lunch, cut-n-paste the client provided content, and you still have 1/2 a week left to tweak it and make client specific changes. But no, whilst wordpress or a dozen other CMS packages would do the job, it seems 1/2 the people want to do it in some bespoke/custom solution... and charge me for "development time". FFS I can do this myself, so I know how easy it could be.
