Moving HTML site to wordpress

I am working on moving a normal HTML website to WordPress for a client. It’s a simple website with a lots of images and HTML text. The idea is that client should be able to modify contents of website through the simple CMS without actually looking into code.

While doing analysis I came across some roadblocks like

Problem: If I want to modify text/ image for Header or footer in wordpress, I will need to do it in PHP code. Solution: Create a customized header/ footer update tab. Modify database to store these contents and modify PHP code to directly read the data from database.

Problem: WordPress provides a set of widgets (blogrolls catergories etc.), I need more like Latest News. Solution: Modify PHP code and datbase, basically create your own widget.

Problem: There are a lot of static HTML pages which are linked from one page to another. Solution: I don’t see any way in wordpress to create static HTML pages which among which we can create links from one to another. Solution: Create a new interface where user can create HTML pages/ plain text content. This will return a link which can be used to provide hyperlinks in another page.

My query is: Are the solutions mentioned above correct? The problems mentioned looks very common, so is there a tried and tested way to solve?