Why you should be using WordPress

It’s a few years now since I started using WordPress.  For those who’ve never heard of it (and yes fellow web designers, there are people who have never heard of it – namely ordinary, non-techie people who have a business to run!!), WordPress is a Content Management System – a tool which allows non-techie people to change and update their website on an on-going basis.

So what’s the point of this post?  I wanted to share with you some pretty startling facts about WordPress, as shared by Joost de Valk in his very clever WordPress Stats Infographic.  You can see his post, with a link to the full infographic here: http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/ or I’ve included a snapshot of the infographic below (credits, of course, to Yoast.com).

A few things that stuck out for me:

• ‘As of March 2012, WordPress is on 72.5M different websites around the globe making WordPress the most widely used and popular CMS in existence’
• ‘Just a handful of examples of the sites using WordPress include Honda, the NFL, the New York Times, Ford, CNN, Harvard Law School, NASA, BBC Top Gear, Tech Crunch, National Geographic, Adobe Blogs and numerous others’  If it’s good enough for them…
• ‘48% of the top 100 blogs, as ranked by Technorati, currently use WordPress as their CMS’
• ‘WordPress boasts the biggest market share when it comes to content management systems: WordPress: 53.8%; Joomla!: 9.2%; Drupal: 6.7%; Others: 30.3%’

It’s very easy to trump all these figures and feel very smug about using WordPress.  But what’s important for me (& for anyone considering a web design):

• There is a reason why so many people are using this system.  It’s easy to use, extensible, flexible, and gets updated regularly.  All these are important.
• Because so many web developers are using the system, you are much more free to move from one supplier to another.  You’re not ‘locked in’ to a single web development company because they built a custom system which no-one else will maintain.

See the full Yoast infographic here: http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/