Back in 2005 at a Web Directions conference I was enjoying a beer with John Allsop, author, developer, conference organiser and many things besides.
I remember clearly that John said that, “Wordpress was going to change the world”. At the time, I thought his statement was a bit of an over-reach. As it turns out, he was completely right.
In fact WordPress has come a very long way from humble beginnings more than 10 years ago when it was used mainly as a blogging tool. Today it’s the content management system (CMS) of choice, used by some of the world’s biggest brands such as CNN, Time, Dow Jones and UPS.
Growing popularity
The numbers speak for themselves. WordPress had 43.03% of the CMS market with 12.3 million users, followed by Drupal with 750, 000 users on 10 March 2014. [Source: http://trends.builtwith.com/cms]
And any reservations about the concept of Open Source CMS vs proprietary have long disappeared with the positive experience of thousands of companies of all sizes.
So why has WordPress become so popular among other open source systems? Well it’s a lot about putting control back in the hands of the user. The system’s user-friendliness means that organisations have full autonomy. No need for HTML skills, all the smarts are there under the bonnet and simply work without the need for extensive technical knowledge. It’s plug and play – well, almost.
WordPress uses a web template system backed by a template processor so you can set up the look of your website quickly by selecting from a list of themes. There are thousands of different themes to choose from, all fully coded and ready to go without compromising depth of functionality. These can be changed and customised when required.
WordPress allows companies to create sites that have depth and richness yet are fast to launch. You can readily add interesting dimension to your user’s experience through the multimedia available in the WordPress media library.
Benefits stack up
Sounds good right? Well there are even more benefits and they are important ones for the longevity and richness of your organisation’s website.
Although WordPress is fast to deploy there are no compromises in terms of functionality or its ability to integrate with other third party systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CMS) and ecommerce interfaces.
Then as your organisation grows you can extend the scope of the site without any headaches. As a highly scalable system you can easily extend the scope and functionality of the site well beyond its original form at any time.
Should you require more functionality than that offered “right out of the box” WordPress offers easy to use plugins that are essentially pre-packaged code that adds specific functionality to your site.
Blogs away!
Let’s not forget the system’s blogging functionality, after all WordPress may have outgrown its early blogging roots but it still affords a robust and flexible blogging platform. This makes it easy to improve your site’s content assets and ranking via the powerful medium of the blog.
To round it all off WordPress is Search Engine Optimised (SEO) and will help your website be found more easily through search engines.
That’s quite a list of benefits. No wonder WordPress is leaving the other CMS systems in the shade.
Fatpublisher is now designing and developing websites for our clients. If you are interested in finding out about our web design services, please contact us.
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