I thought about this a great deal and I think the <p> and <li> are not useful either. Just use <br> for everything.

If you provide the 
student
 author with a template document starting with the doc type, html, head and body tag they can just copy that and use it without knowing what it does. Does a great article stand or fall by having a <title> I think not?

I even included a sidebar one time

<div style="float:right; width 300px">
<img src="logo.png">
<br>Joe's car wash
<br>
<br>tel:
<br>0123 45678
<br>
<br>email:
<br>joe@example.com
</div>

I set the css to display img{width:100%}

I explain ftp, he knew already how to get pictures from his camera into folders and how to rename them. <br>, <a> and <img> was the entire tag set I teach him. Examples of both are in the template. (At some point the <h3> tag might become useful)

I told him to make sub folders named after the date and to backup his current page before making changes. Its not required but if you want to rollback to a working version it will rollback to the last time you've made a backup AND it is nice to see your own progress later on.

I then sit back silently for months and periodically visit his page observing in pure awe how it progressed. At one point he added a visitor counter that was only an image. I thought it looked amateurish but that he was able to do it was fun to see. (He initially put it at the end of the page but there it got 100% width so he moved it to the side bar. (where it "belongs"))

It all went perfectly until some "professional" webdeveloper told him it was only this and only that. I then moved in and explained the "professional" was not sophisticated enough to even begin to understand how perfect the website was. He could pay a few thousand and have the guy install wordpress but I guarantee it wont do anything extra and it will just stop working some day. I would have installed it myself if I thought it a good idea.

For laughs I press reload a few times then ran a speed test on the static html document and compared it to the webdev shop's official website. Look how slow it is? This is just the first visit, if on the second visit the images are loaded from the visitors own hard drive the speed difference is much more dramatic. I show the source of the pages. Look what mess this is? How could anyone work like that?

Look how you are able to maintain your own website while its security is better than that of the bank. Of course your hosting provider can get hacked but with WP you get all of those attack vectors and all of those bugs + extras.

He didn't hire the webdesigner. I only hear from him one time when he wanted to know how to link his image to a larger version. <a href="brush.png"><img src="brush.png"></a>

Think of books. Name a famous author who became famous for his typography, his use of colors and illustrations. That everyone is trying to turn their website into a high end popup book is simply to compensate for their lack of content. I'm telling you to compensate with functionality for lack of color and glitter.

Today I would suggest (or would have suggested) the web dev should help wash cars for 2 weeks THEN explain how technology can help the process along. You can pay him whatever seems appropriate. I'm not going to rule out the guy will come up with a brilliant idea since I haven't washed cars for 2 weeks. I did see lots of automation made by people who didn't understand the work or the product. You cant guess the edge cases. Only doing the work will teach you.