With evectors IdeaTools we took yet another approach: besides serving all pages live from Frontier (this is how most of our sites are served), we recently implemented a new feature called "Dynamic Rendering" where sites are served from a regular http server (Apache or IIS), but pages are composed on the fly from static pieces using some standard (and fast) server side includes (php or asp).

This allow all the performance, reliability and scalability of the baked approach, but also some degree of contents personalization. On e-commerce web sites, for example, each user is seeing his own shopping basket in every page, but the shopping basket graphics is only generated once (when anything is added to the shopping basket), then saved as a piece of text and dynamically included in every page, meaning that no query is sent to any database to serve the single page.

For complex sites with a lot of navigation links, this approach is also faster since, for example, adding a new story causes the generation of a new version of the table of contents, but not of all pages where the table of contents appear.