how do you deal with complex front pages

Hey, so here’s my dillema let’s say I’m working on a front page for a client and it has tons of teaser paragraphs for a bunch of content and images etc.

what would be the sensible way to do this? on the one hand I could do a loop and draw the content from a bunch of different pages and posts, or on the other hand, I could just do a custom template and just put the html in there..

The downside would be that the client couldn’t edit it without interacting with the code, but on the other hand, say they were looking for a particular paragraph on the front page that is part of some random post, it might be just as hard to locate that post and make changes than to go in to the template and just change the text.. what are people’s thoughts on this?