As you might have noticed this blog is powered by WordPress. As too are many other tech blogs, namely, Techcrunch, Mashable and Smashing Magazine. In fact, it is estimated that WordPress powers 8% of the worlds websites including many Fortune 500 companies such as Honda, Ford, WSJ, Nokia, and Samsung.
So just what is WordPress anyway? Wordpress is essentially web software that you can use to create a website or a blog using PHP & MySQL without actually knowing any PHP or MySQL! It is both simple to use and free, or open source. Crucially, it is built and developed by hundreds of volunteers. These factors combined have seen WordPress become the most popular hosted blogging and CMS platform in the world, a position which was cemented in 2010 when Microsoft began to switch it’s 30m Windows Live blogs over to WordPress. All pretty impressive you might say, so how did WordPress come to be such a powerhouse. Predictably, it was founded by a guy called Matt Mullenweg back in 2003, at the tender age of just 19. Since then, Mullenweg has been named as the 16th most important person on the web, led several rounds of VC funding, and now presides over Automattic, the premium hosting arm of WordPress.com, a profitable company of some 40 people. I won’t go into too much detail on his bio, I’ll leave that to the ever capable Wikipedia.
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
There is an important distinction to make straight off the bat between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The former is an online hosted WYSIWYG editor, where as the latter is a content management system (CMS) that you install onto a web hosting account, with a domain name. This blog is powered by WordPress.org. Both variations are equally good at what they do. WordPress.com is the ideal platform for users that are just getting started in blogging and don’t want to get bogged down in technical stuff. WordPress.org, on the other hand has quickly become an incredibly user friendly, versatile but powerful CMS. It is this fact in particular that has seen a significant ecosystem develop around WordPress.org ranging from theme designs, plugins, templates, SEO and affiliate marketing.
For the remainder of this post I am going to focus on WordPress.org as it is this variation that has nurtured the ecosystem. WordPress.org is a small piece of software, that you download in a zip file, and install on your hosting server using the “famous 5min install feature”. Realistically it is faster than that as most hosting providers allow you to do a one click install from your hosting backend. As soon as you login to the web interface at www.yourdomain/wordpress/wp-login.php, WordPress is completely intuitive and a joy to use. The real beauty of WordPress for me though lies within themes. There are literally thousands of them both free and paid for. In fact the WordPress themes business has become a thriving ecosystem in it’s own right with companies like WooThemes, Themeforest and Press75 producing beautiful customisable themes and frameworks. In fact this blog is in it’s third theme now, currently using Orman Clark’s fantastic Premium Pixels Theme. When you download a theme, you can either upload it via FTP or through the online interface. As soon as a new theme is activated your website will have a completely new look and feel, and therein lies it’s beauty. At an average of $35 per theme, they are certainly much cheaper than a web design agency and much quicker. Anyone with a modicum of HTML experience can also customise them heavily. Considering a good theme can sell into the 10′s of thousands, and some providers like WooThemes.com have 90 themes it’s easy to see how this quickly scales to a sizeable business.
One of the best thing about wordpress is the plugins. If you are struggling with some functionality it is more than likely there is a plugin that will do the job for you, whether that be installing google analytics, a newsletter subscription service or simply a Facebook Like button.
Apart from the theme and plugin businesses, WordPress has been a real cash cow for web hosting companies like GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Hostgator, VPS.Net, Rackspace etc. Almost all of these companies offer a specialist WordPress hosting package.
Why is WordPress so popular then?
WordPress has become so popular, on the one hand, because of it’s simplicity for people looking to start a blog. As the functionality has developed though, it has expanded to be an enterprise ready CMS. One of the most important segments of WordPress’ success has been affiliate marketing. WordPress is a very SEO friendly CMS and together with the ever popular SEO plugins from Yoast de Valk has allowed affiliate marketers to build SEO friendly sites very quickly. I won’t dip my toe into the argument about affiliate marketing and content farms right now, but rather acknowledge that WordPress is the favoured platform of some very smart SEO’s out there.
What does the future hold for WordPress?
Recently, WordPress or more accurately it’s founder Matt Mullenweg became embroiled in a public disagreement with one of the most successful members of the WordPress ecosystem, Chris Pearson. Chris Pearson is the creator of Thesis one of the most popular, and SEO optimised WordPress themes. All theme designers must adhere to the WordPress GPL which decrees that any expansion or derivatives of the WordPress codebase must be provided for free. This spat has now been resolved with Chris falling back in line with the GPL, but with more and more businesses thriving off what is essentially a free piece of software, Matt Mullenweg has quite a job on his hand policing the ecosystem.
The latest release of wordpress 3.x has made some extremely important changes, mainly under the hood that will allow much greater customisation particularly important for non tech people that will be creating content, inc. custom taxonomies. This in my opinion should lead more large brands to adopt WordPress as their CMS. For 95% of major clients, WordPress provides more than ample functionality and with the addition of products like Vaultpress, the security is getting tightened.
Moreover, WooThemes are constantly innovating into niche theme functionality with themes for classifieds, restaurants, car listings, e-commerce, Q&A, project management all in the pipeline.
So the future looks very bright for Matt Mullenweg and WordPress, save for one very disruptive new kid on the block. That new kid goes by the name of Tumblr!
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