WordPress’s humble beginnings as an open-sourced blog platform are ancient history. Today, it’s the reigning king of the internet. While we’ve played around with other DIY platforms like Wix, Weebly, and Shopify (usually at the insistence of our clients) we’ve always gone back to WordPress.
WordPress is now the 800LB gorilla in the room and nobody can deny it. They’ve taken over the internet and with that has come to a lot of great benefits for the users. The fact that it started and remains as an open-source platform is truly mind-blowing.
(Edit from 11/12/19 below)
I looked back at this infographic we created at Rhino Marketing Group a couple years back and it still makes me smile. I remember when I was initially starting with web design it was still the wild west of content management systems and WordPress was a bit of a red-headed step-child in most people’s eyes. WordPress was originally designed to be a blogging platform and while it is still an AMAZING blogging platform it has grown to be much much more. To think of how WordPress has grown so far so fast and it’s competitors like tumblr and bloggr really just got stuck in their ways and didn’t become flexible with what they were offering to the public shows how important it is to listen to your audience.
WordPress sites are directly responsible for over 80% of the revenue that we generate at Rhino Marketing Group and just when we think we’ve seen all there is to amazing wordpress hacks and tricks some new company emerges with a new bag of tricks. Why is WordPress so popular – because it makes creating stunning sites with incredible functionality fast and easy. If you’ve ever had the experience of having a custom WordPress site made for you or your company you might have laughed when you read fast and easy because often times development can take quite some time but I can assure you that building something from scratch or even using other platforms is incredibly painful when compared to WordPress.
One other system we sometimes use at Rhino Marketing Group is called Webflow. The great thing about Webflow is that it’s essentially code-less and works on a visual framework. While it’s fun to use and offers a lot of granular controls about every little nook and cranny of the design, we’ve often hit a wall in terms of functionality with Webflow. Not only are elaborate forms and great shopping cart functions just missing from the platform, but the total autonomy to design whatever you want however you want is also kind of a handicap is some ways.
While it’s true that you can make WordPress look like anything, the general approach is to follow design trends and most builders and plugins that assist in deploying WordPress take those design trends into consideration which makes developing a good looking site very quick – unlike Webflow where you kind of have to start with a blank canvas every time which can be quite cumbersome and daunting.
There was a point in my early career where I had to make a decision as to which platform I was going to learn to develop and I had a chance encounter with a woman who wrote a short book on blogging for business who suggested I take a look at WordPress – boy am I glad she nudged me in the right direction. That was over 10 years ago and once I started building in WordPress I never looked back. It truly is an amazing platform that can bend and flex to just about any client, learning how to master WordPress has proven to be many times more valuable than anything I learned in college.
