Wordpress is a content (site and blog) management system and has been around for quite a while, over 6 years actually. It’s picked up quite a bit in the past few years for a few different reasons:
- Easy-to-use Content Management
- Easy-to-install Content Management
- It’s Free!
It started out geared more towards blogging, but over the years, Wordpress has transformed into more of a complete site content management system with the ability to handle both webpages and blog posts. Years ago, it would have cost a company thousands of dollars to have a custom website with an integrated content management system like Wordpress. Today, a Wordpress site can be created in just a few minutes, with many free or paid Themes (styles) and Plugins to choose from.
Essentially what the web is moving towards is general uniformity. Statistics on coding trends indicate this well. Wordpress uses PHP, a free scripting language that has become the most popular coding language with the help of authors releasing open-source (free) code (like Wordpress). Just a few popular sites using PHP, according to Wikipedia:
- Wikipedia
- Yahoo!
- MyYearbook
- Digg
- Joomla
- YouTube
- Drupal
- Tagged
With this rise in open-source software and the move towards general uniformity, consumers are benefiting tremendously! The web is becoming less of an expensive custom coding environment and more of a plug-and-play kinda deal. Of course, custom website development will be needed for a long time. Wordpress has helped to satisfy a very large market – people looking for a free and easy-to-manage simple website or blog with a variety of style choices and customization options; but it will be a while before all website needs have such a plug-and-play solution.
Of course, there are many other content managment systems just like Wordpress that try to tackle everyone’s website needs. However, the issue is that some website needs are just too different than others. A simple pet sitting website will be completely different than a full scale ecommerce website. The idea in creating the same solution for both is finding the similarities, but the problem becomes making the plug-and-play solution easy and fast enough for both websites, that is, easier and faster than a traditional customized approach.
A professional website developer will know whether or not Wordpress or another plug-and-play content management system is the way to go for a website. And that’s where the skill of website design will go in the future – towards consultation with coding on the side. It’ll be helping companies realize what is avilable and how to package their service into plug-and-play options without decreasing any quality in delivery.
