Most (but not all) of the experience admins on here (I don't admin anymore sadly
) don't like maintenance plans. The primary problem is debugging the things when they go wrong. Also, for more complex stuff than backups they don't always have enough parameters.
For backups I would use T-SQl and a job. For other stuff like index management I have my own code.
You can look here at Tara's code for standard administrative tasks:
Database maintenance routines