WordPress Dominance

On the WordPress Blog, on August 19th, in their State of the Word post, WordPress announced some facts about usage of their platform.

First, 147,000 of the top one million sites on the web are using WordPress, up from 85,000 not long ago. In addition, and this is more important for us, “22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.” The reason for the growing popularity of WordPress is that it’s the easy platform to install and manage.

A basic WordPress blog can be up in minutes. Add a different theme and some plugins and its ready to go and SEO friendly. If you don’t want to set it up yourself, you can have it done by someone for no more than a few hundred dollars. It wasn’t long ago that a decent site was in the $2,000 dollar range. Now, we’re talking $200 or less. Bid it out on ODesk or Elance, or if you want to go local use Craigslist.

Using WordPress doesn’t change the process of market research and keyword research. It just makes it easy to set up the site and publish and manage your content. It also allows you to use pages or posts when publishing content. For more on that, visit our post WordPress – Posts or Pages – Which is Best?

Now, a few hundred dollars is what you will pay for the set-up, plugins and a basic theme for your WordPress site. For $200-300 more you can have a custom template created to meet your custom needs. To get an idea of what can be done with WordPress, visit Groupmind.

Another thing about WordPress is that if there are so many sites using the platform, that your site visitors will be accustomed to the navigation. This factor makes usability decision less of an issue. You pick the design and WordPress will allow you to use, one column, 2 column left, 2 column right, 3 column, and / or top menus for navigation. It’s a very elegant and visitor friendly platform.

WordPress is working on HTML5 compatibility. WordPress is open source and the platform itself is free. The platform is constantly enhanced and improved and there’s no danger you site will be on an obsolete platform.

WordPress Dominance