Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) is a critical step in your web design process. With the time and expense involved in your initial setup, you want to choose the CMS that fits your business needs both now and well into the future.
Over the next few weeks, we will be examining the distinct benefits for each of the current “Big 3” in the CMS world – WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla – to help you decide which one is right for your company.
While all 3 have particular strengths, any of these 3 systems can likely meet (or be customized to meet) your business needs. Our focus will be on some of the distinct benefits each CMS holds over the others.
The iPhone of CMS
Calling WordPress the “iPhone of CMS” may even be understating their current market domination. WordPress currently powers 23% of the internet. 51.26% of the Top Million websites currently using CMS technologies are built on WordPress. By comparison, Joomla is at 5.95%, and Drupal is at 5.68%.
Beyond a 10.15% share for Blogger, a free weblog publishing tool from Google, no other CMS is even close to a 2% share; meaning WordPress is nearly 9 times as popular as its two closest competitors (among higher traffic sites).
What makes WordPress so popular?
Though it began as simple blogging software, the WordPress framework has evolved into one of the most elite, open source Content Management Systems available. It is utilized to run everything from personal blogs to websites for Fortune 500 companies.
Big names such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired, CNN, Best Buy, eBay, and Sony Music have all utilized the WordPress platform. So what are the key benefits this system offers versus Joomla and Drupal?
Ease of Use
The simple WordPress user interface makes updating your website and content, from blog posts to multimedia like photos and videos, simple. WordPress offers a multitude of ways to customize your website, with relative ease.
With both a classic editor:
And a visual editor available:
You can customize WordPress to fit your working style. Editing your website content feels similar to updating social networking accounts you may already use daily, like Facebook and Twitter.
Customization
WordPress uses web standards and open source PHP, making it easier and faster for your design team to make future upgrades to your website. For this reason, it is the most cost-efficient and effective way to build upon your website.
As you’d expect, WordPress has a wide range of features and add-ons available to fit nearly every business need, with 36,330 plugins and growing, and an easy to browse directory:
Currently on version 4.1.1, its open source nature assures continuous improvement from thousands of CMS developers and millions of users around the world.
SEO
Your goal, of course, is to drive as much traffic to your website as you can, as inexpensively as possible. And guess what? Google loves it some WordPress:
By taking care of the SEO mechanics with a solid foundation, WordPress lets you simplify your SEO efforts and put more focus into creating the content that will increase your rankings further and drive more traffic to your site.
Unless your business requires (or could later require) some of the additional complexities of Joomla! or Drupal, make it easy on yourself. Our CMS recommendations for our partners take into account all of their unique needs, but when WordPress can handle the project, it’s our CMS of choice.
It’s what our website – createconquer.com (and our upcoming redesign) – is built on. Simple enough for beginners, but expandable and adaptable enough for Fortune 500 companies. It’s tough to go wrong with WordPress.
Read Part 2: “3 Benefits to Choosing Drupal as Your CMS”
Read Part 3: “2 Benefits to Choosing Joomla as Your CMS”