Many people are aware that WordPress is the number one blogging software in the world. But what may not be so widely known is that now — according to Google Trends — WordPress has moved past Joomla to also become the number one open source website Content Management System (CMS). Drupal, another popular CMS, remains in third place.
This development begs the question… why are so many people choosing WordPress?
We believe there are several reasons. Perhaps most important is ease-of-use, both for designers and for their clients.
EASY TO USE
During our time as website designers, we have worked with clients to create and maintain sites built with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and hands down, WordPress is the easiest to use. It is incredibly intuitive.
With both Joomla and Drupal, we’ve had clients simply throw up their hands, tell us they couldn’t maintain their own sites, and ask us to do it for them. That doesn’t happen with WordPress. We typically spend about an hour or so going over the WordPress CMS with clients, and then they’re off and running.
The WordPress CMS enables clients to make updates to both text and images on their sites with no problem. Images and other media are uploaded and stored in a media library where they accessed as needed, or simply deleted. Edit fields can be set up for each area of the webpage template where text is used. Plus, for more advanced users, they can access the page’s HTML to make formatting changes if they wish to.
Creating a new page is just one click away. When a new page is added, the user chooses which section it goes in, which page it goes under, and which page template it should use. WordPress uses these choices to automatically add the page to the site’s navigation system.
CUSTOM THEME DESIGN
Many people have used the popular WordPress.com website to setup a free blog, but the CMS which designers use to create your website is located at WordPress.org. We use that CMS software to create your website, which can incorporate a blog or not. Blogs are a small part of what WordPress is able to do.
WordPress does provide many pre-designed themes (website look & feel) a user can choose from, but any client concerned with their brand will require a custom theme design. But even though a professional web designer is required to create your custom theme, WordPress does make this an easier task than the other CMS tools, which also no doubt has added to its popularity.
TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG
If you think you may ever want to incorporate a blog in your site, then WordPress is an obvious CMS choice. It was originally created to be a blogging tool, and it is way ahead of any other CMS when it comes to blogging capabilities and options. And if you don’t want a blog early on, you can easily add it later.
But you may not want a blog at all. Is WordPress still a good choice? You bet. We’ve created as many WordPress sites that don’t have blogs as we have sites that do. In the past year, WordPress has introduced enhancements that make it a truly full-featured CMS that provides a very solid website foundation, which can be expanded significantly through the use of various component plug-ins.
SOME TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES
If you’ve had your website for awhile, you may have been through the process of deciding whether you wanted a CMS-driven website or a static site. Before the advent of open source CMS options (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), most websites that sported a CMS were custom programmed, and were quite costly to develop. Clients who wanted smaller sites had more limited choices, but there were affordable solutions, such as using Dreamweaver to develop sites that were basically static, but that used library items and include statements to help facilitate site-wide updates. Clients often used programs like Adobe Contribute to maintain their sites. This type of approach actually worked fine for many organizations, but there were a number of built-in limitations.
Adding new pages was difficult because of the various steps involved in building the page into the site’s navigation system. With WordPress, all of this is simply part of the page building process, and is something the client can do without the help of the site developer.
Also, when it comes time to refresh or redesign the site, rather than have to deal with design alterations to all of your website pages (which could be 50 to 100 or in some cases significantly more), the redesign effort is focused on the site’s template collection. So even if you’re using 10 different page templates, that’s still substantially less work, which means less money spent on development and design.
There’s a lot more flexibility in the new WordPress CMS than has ever existed before, which bodes well for both web designers and their clients.
NO CMS IS PERFECT
Every open source CMS has plusses and minuses. Whether your developer chooses WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or some other proprietary CMS, none of them are perfect. You will encounter occasional bugs and limitations… that’s the nature of application development.
But based on our experience, we think WordPress is the best CMS currently available.
SOME SAMPLE WORDPRESS SITES
Here are several WordPress sites we’ve developed. Some incorporate blogs and some don’t.
COMPARISON SHOPPING
Here are a couple sites that compare WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
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