Celebrate WordPress Day
Join us on 27 May in celebrating WordPress Day.
If you’re trying hard not to feel old, we’re sorry to tell you that WordPress, the beloved blogging and CMS platform, has settled into its teenage years today, celebrating its 14th birthday. Join us on 27 May in celebrating WordPress Day.
How it all started
To understand the history of WordPress, we need to take a journey back to 2003. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little were the brains behind WordPress, launching it as a replacement of the existing blogging software b2/cafelog. Complete with support forum, schematic documentation, and a development blog, it didn’t take long for the vision to take off and by the end of the first year, Little and his partner Dougal Campbell built a tab for modifying the search named Ping-O-Matic.
Since then, its position as the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) has been cemented, with it now powering about a quarter of the world’s websites. To put it into context, there’s over 1.1 billion active websites as of May 2017. To this day, WordPress is free to use and maintains its open source capability.
WordPress fun facts
- WordPress has released 32 versions throughout its 14 year history
- There are 35,640 plug-ins (current as of May 2017)
- WordPress has been translated into 51 dialects (current as of May 2017)
- Businesses and individuals have contributed to over 829,825,409 downloads of WordPress to date (current as of May 2017)
Advantages of WordPress
- Themes – WordPress offers thousands of themes for users which allow you to change the design of your website quickly. Themes are customisable so whether you operate a fashion blog, online store, or news site, there’ll be a theme to suit your desired branding and cater to how a customer navigates your website.
- SEO friendly – The way WordPress has kept its coding clean and simple is a big tick in Google’s book. Provided the website has been set up correctly and essential SEO practices are being undertaken, your WordPress website will be accepted by the Google spiders.
- Simple setup for mobile responsiveness – The biggest trend in 2017 is to create websites to be viewed on mobile devices first. WordPress makes this easy for you to do. By selecting a mobile-friendly theme, a plug-in which converts your sites appearance to be responsive to smart devices or a custom CSS file, and a mobile-responsive design, you can achieve a website which is optimised for mobile – and the 80% of internet users who own a smart-phone.
WordPress has its advantages and disadvantages, and what works well for one business may not be suitable for another. If you’re looking for a Brisbane web developer, iFactory can build a website with intuitive and meaningful design. View our work to see what an iFactory website designer in Brisbane can create for you and contact us today for a custom web design quote.
