When WordPress first made its appearance in the world of open source platforms, nobody imagined that the little guy will go on to scale the popularity charts. At the back of this platform was a simple enough concept; it wanted to offer bloggers an easy to use blogging platform that had all the necessary functionalities and features that could help achieve blogging success.
Very soon from a publishing platform, it made its transition to also becoming a content management system (CMS) and quickly achieved success as a CMS as well. Again, its success came off as a surprise because a) it had to fight off challenge from plenty of other CMSs both open source and proprietary b) it didn’t have out of the box characteristics that differentiated it from its competitors.
But, here we are wrong; users, and I am talking about developers and end users, realized that there was one characteristic that made WordPress a better choice in terms of a publishing system and CMS as compared to other platforms – this characteristic was usability.
For my money, it was usability, convenience and the fact that it is so easy to use and to understand that has made it one of the most popular open source platforms over the years.
So, let’s take a look at the WordPress story as to why it stole a march over its competitors. The WordPress success story is no different from the countless other products and services success stories. Let’s take a look:
Focused on a Core Target Audience
WordPress was built for a specific purpose and was targeted towards a particular constituency – bloggers. It was aimed at people who weren’t tech savvy but needed a platform that allowed them to create and publish their content easily. WordPress made it big and continues making it big by solving the problems of its core constituency. It doesn’t try and fit in features and functionalities of diverse audiences, that is “something for everybody”; this is precisely what Drupal and Joomla have been accused of doing. They come across as platforms that are trying to please everybody. No doubt these platforms are very good, but they are still not able to capture the pulse of their target audience as WordPress keeps doing consistently.
It’s because, WordPress is clearly focusing its attention on a single target group alone, that it has become so successful. It was able to identify and solve specific blogger related problems, which made it the first choice of bloggers.
Easy to Use
It’s been ages since WordPress made its appearance, actually it released in early 2003, which is just around ten years back, but in the world of web technology a decade is almost like a century. But even after all these years, can you find one open source platform that is as easy-to-use as is WordPress. Frankly, its ease of use is legendary and the fact that even somebody with very limited or zero technical knowledge can install and set it up is one of its strongest selling points.
Want a blog up and running on WordPress within hours? No problem, it’s done! Name another publishing platform or CMS that is as good as WordPress and which can be set up as quickly. That’s it, there isn’t any and that is why this platform keeps scaling the popularity charts day-in and day-out. WordPress developers have focused on building features and functionalities that are content driven and not driven by technicalities.
Contribution of the Blogging Revolution
There is no doubt that the popularity of blogging contributed towards the popularity of WordPress. A look at http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ will tell you that the popularity of one revolutionary activity (blogging) fed the popularity of a revolutionary platform (WordPress). If somebody wants to communicate digitally by having a blog or website up and running, then typically the first choice is going to be WordPress. This is a fact. If you want a website developed using an open source platform and get in touch with a developer for the same, the first question that he/she ask you is whether you want to use WordPress or not?
Some of the top websites in the world run on WordPress, a case in point being Smashing Magazine, TechCrunch, and TED. The fact that some of the top technology sites in the world are using WordPress also feed its popularity. People will go, “If TED is using it, I want to use it too”. When popular websites use a platform, it gets more credibility and as can be imagined, it is the reputation of a product or services that defines its popularity on the market. This is why WordPress works big time.
It Does its Job and Does it well
What do you want your publishing or content management systems to do? Simple! To do their jobs and to do it well. This is what WordPress does and this is also what makes it so popular. It doesn’t fall into the trap of over-promising and under delivering; it makes no false claims towards technical superiority, but only makes claims with respect to efficiency. This is why it succeeds where others are failing. Ok, let me revise that statement – this is why it succeeds in spite of all the competition. I have revised the statement because it’s not that other platforms aren’t doing well, in fact they are doing quite well. It’s just that WordPress has entrenched itself so well in the public psyche that it’s going to be difficult for its competitors to dislodge it from the throne.
The Big Guy Getting More Popular
To think of WordPress as somebody who wanted to stand up and be counted are gone. Today, other platforms are scrambling to get some part of the digital pie that is being gobbled up by WordPress. We can’t say that the battle for audience’s mind space is just heating up, because it’s been a heated battle right from the very beginning.
The real winner here is of course the consumer who is the center of attention, with every open source platform bringing in various benefits, features, functionalities to lure him/her to use its services.
