June 24, 2013
The world has had WordPress for 10 years now. And it’s amazing how far we’ve come. It has grown from its roots as a way to easily start your own blog to a complete content management system (CMS) that can run your entire website. The growth is dramatic, now being used by over 60 million websites.
To see that growth, you need to have a few things in your favor. Here is my opinion on why WordPress has become so popular:
It’s so darn easy. Editing a website is now almost as easy as using Word. The interface is comparable so people are no longer scared of getting under the hood.
Thousands of plugins. Related to the ease, plugins let you add features within minutes that would take weeks of coding and testing to build from scratch.
So many ready-to-go themes. There are so many high quality themes available with new selections being added every day. Some theme builders have made over $1 million selling on themeforest.com alone, so many more will add their themes trying to achieve that same success. A perfect storm for theme buyers.
Dedicated updates. We’ve all seen some great stuff over the years that started strong, but didn’t have a group of dedicated people behind it. So it begins to get tired, bugs aren’t fixed, people begin to look for alternatives and eventually it’s irrelevant. Not so with WordPress! The original team is still largely involved and updates are released often, keeping users on the cutting edge.
Huge developer community. Helping with updates, support and add-ons is a massive developer and user community. It’s a rare day when I can’t find an answer to a question or problem by searching for it online. There are so many users, I’m never the first to have the same question.
Moving Forward
Naturally, as we hit the decade milestone, we look forward to what may be in the future. Here are some things I see coming:
Better media management. In the early days when WordPress was a blog tool, you only uploaded the images you used in blog posts. Now as a website manager, there are logos, backgrounds, blog images, page images, audio files, PDFs, etc. You get the picture. We’re dealing with many more files, but still the same manager. While there are plugins to deal with this, I see future releases baking in better media management.
Splitting to add a basic version. There is already a movement underway to get back to the basic blogging roots. WordPress has grown to the point that if someone wants a simple blog, WordPress can be overkill. I can see a basic version being spawned giving site owners the option to go big or go small.
At Moxley Carmichael we love WordPress. It gives us the opportunity to build fantastic websites that are not only visually striking, but work exactly as the client needs, while giving them the power to control the site when they need to. It’s a win for everyone.
How about you? What are you favorite parts of WordPress? And what changes do you see coming in the future?
