WordPress: the way forward

Tiger Global Management’s $60 million investment in Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has prompted discussion about the tool created by Matt Mullenweg, which many of us see as the web page content manager of the future.

In the old days, content management systems were enormously complicated and sophisticated; beyond the reach of most of us. Today,WordPress is behind around 20 percent of web pages, a significant increase on 2010’s 12 percent, with Joomla, another open source tool, with 3.3 percent, bringing up a distant second. Around 65 percent of pages do not use any type of content manager, a percentage that has decreased from the 80 per cent of 2010.

WordPress, which has a workforce of around 200 people, has a “work where you want” policy and a business model based on “many little things”: it offers users a wide range of free services, backed up by premium products such as an anti-spam filter for companies, or simple tools such as a domain redirector, all of which are the basis of its significant growth.

The growth of WordPress’ market is not just based on blogs and personal sites, but is increasingly rooted in its use to manage corporate sites. While the presence of individuals on the web has grown and simplified, thanks mainly to the development of the social networks and dead simple tools such as Tumblr, more sophisticated personal pages are still a segment largely limited to advanced users. Corporate website managers, on the other side, are becoming increasingly aware of the advantages that using a content management system can bring, and WordPress is being increasingly seen as the way forward.

Have a look at your company’s web site: you’ll probably find some kind of “electronic brochure”: out of date, and not terribly attractive; or maybe some kind of useless advertisement from the days when people believed that the web was going to follow the lead of television. In many cases, creating a new web project means starting from scratch, or redesigning a page based on the old principle of form follows function. In reality, these types of projects are falling into misuses in the face of what seems to be a new focus based on more appropriate parameters for a social-media led web.

Increasingly, a web site should be a showcase for up-to-the-minute information about a company, as well as a way to get to know it: laid out clearly, relevant, easy to update, and fostering interaction with social networks. Websites are more and more like magazines, offering content about the company, its products, and anything that might affect or interest its potential followers. From a static focus based on the idea of somehow “impressing” the visitor, we have moved toward the idea that visitors will return frequently to the page, monitoring content in the context of a company that tries to become referential for a specific area.

From its beginnings as a simple blogging tool, WordPress is increasingly becoming the core for a growing number of web projects and sites. If WordPress is not on the radar of your company’s technology department, it is very likely that your company’s web site will be overly complex and inefficient. The vast majority of information that a company needs to manage on the web is done so best via a content provider like WordPress: in the case of complex, or unique projects, using WordPress is almost a therapeutic exercise, an opportunity to rethink from the very beginnings just what having a presence on the web is supposed to mean.

Static pages linked to sections that are regularly updated, along with a growth philosophy subject to the discipline imposed by the permalink philosophy, a resource that will always be available, despite whether it is being actually shown or not. The task of deciding on the source, production and development of this content is much more important in itself for a company now than that of managing, which should reduced to the simplest tasks possible.

The blog format as an accompaniment to other pages and modules is increasingly being chosen by companies that want to project a fresh, simple, and modern image, at the same time as offering a wide range of possibilities: being open source from the get go means that WordPress has been able to attract a huge number of developers that in turn are generating tools, templates, and functionalities of all types.

The result is websites that are cheaper and simpler to create and manage, and that at the same time are more powerful and efficient as a communication tool. More and more companies are reflecting the current spirit of the web rather than trotting out old-hat ideas that miss the point: minimalism applied where it needs to be applied, and rooted in a philosophy that allows for effective search engine access. If your web is not working the way most other webs do, then you’ve gone wrong somewhere. The new web presence model means that managing through a tool like WordPress is now a more than reasonable option.