WordPress was first introduced to the internet in 2003. It grew from the b2/cafelog designed by Michel Valdrighi in 2001. It was conceived in order to improve the layout and readability of content produced frequently and often. It started with less than 10 users but since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging platform in the world. So why is it also being used as a CMS running literally millions of full blown websites offering far more than just blogging?
As a blogging tool WordPress is/was imperious and still is. However as a website management tool it excels at many of the more mundane requirements for a website in the early '10s of the 21st Century.
Take for example the templating or theming of a WordPress website The tool has become so popular that there are literally thousands of free themes available for a web designer to use or alter to create a unique theme suitable for a client. But that, you might say, is available to many CMS's such as Joomla. It is, but the theming of a WordPress site is so much more logical than many other CMS's offer.
So what, any web designer worth their pay should be able to design a theme for many of the more popular open source CMS platforms. That is true, but it is the combination of this simple process and many other attributes of WordPress that build together a compelling reason for using it as a website website CMS.
The fact that the hosting requirements are so simple to satisfy, the administration area are so intuitive, the sites run quickly and that there is a vast following of keen and skilled community members who often provide answers to sticky questions almost instantaneously cuts out so much design and development time that costs can be pared to a minimum.
Websites that are built on the WordPress open source platform are extremely easy to build into stunningly complex website management tools. Take for example ecommerce; there are a multitude of ecommerce lugins for the WordPress platform. Each of these plugins has its benefits and its restrictions but it lowers the entry skill level for a web sited designer / builder to such a level that almost no coding skills are required at all.
Of course reducing the level of coding required for a web designer is good in one way, but it also provides problems in the future. Where will the future coders come from? Do we need to be concerned about the lack of coding skills? Maybe but yet again this reduction in work benefits both the client and the designer in that time is money and a reduction in time inevitably reduces the cost for the website as well.
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