Lately, I have been looking at some trends in the world of web design. More and more sites out there seem to be built on Wordpress. Many moons ago. Wordpress was predominantly used as a blog platform used by personal bloggers. Now more and more businesses from your local dry cleaner to the downtown lawyer firm are using it for their main website. Does this mean web-designers will have less work? Obviously, there will be some tweaking to be done...but how do web designers out there feel about more and more sites being based on Wordpress? Are the days of emailing content updates to your web-designer coming to an end? Are we moving into more of a self-service type of content updating? What does this all mean in terms of SEO?
I build my websites using HTML with a WP install in a folder generally as without a doubt WP has benefits for SEO. However unlike most I like to have my out of WP pages built around things from my index pages also for SEO to work alongside WP. Last figures I saw I think WP based sites accounted for was 21% to 24% (depending where you read) so we might say nigh on 25% of the web is WP and if I am correct that was in some top lists of sites and I don't just mean the one from Alexa peeps might think I mean. Many small businesses who want to add their own content and can benefit from such, as well as being able to take some of this (SEO) in house, can benefit greatly by using WP, so love it, hate it or indifferent about it, it is going to be used and is used by more and more poeple as a simple but effective solution to these peoples needs. For it's bad points which ones hears about, WP offers an easy to undertand and effective way for those with other things to do beyond web development to take care of content creation. And we all know how content and king splice together with an is.
I was thinking this same thing today - I remember back when you had to mod a CMS to fit your needs, but now WP pretty much has everything (especially with the plugins you can install). I don't think designers are going to be out of a job, because people still need skins/designs for their sites. But, there's less up front work for cms installations and that kind of thing.
I think wordpress has just made web development extremely accessible for the masses, not only does it benefit SEO but it is just so easy to use. I think in the future it is only going to become even more popular than it is today, designers may well be out of a job, there will certainly be much less of a market requirement for them at least.
There are millions of websites powered by Wordpress already. It a simple to use and comes with a number of themes and plug-ins. When compared to more robust content management systems such as Joomla, it is more easier to use. And it is fully customizable. This is one of the reasons why it is very popular. Unless another blogging platform overtakes it, I think it will soon become the leading CMS.
Wordpress is the best and open source CMS available for blogging and even to build some customizable corporate or official sites. Wordpress is easy to use and is search engine friendly.
So if you were to launch a new site tomorrow, that is Google-friendly and aestheically pleasing would you just make it a Wordpress site?
A vast majority of that 21% to 24% likely have, but myself I do differently as I said above which takes more work. Majority will likely say just use WP, I would hazzard a guess, you will find in coming answers...