Here comes a big post…
Yesterday I read an interesting post about Wordpress 3.0 getting ready to launch. I’ve been in the web design and development business for about 5 years. And I remember when Wordpress was just a blogging tool. Now, it’s so much more. Only a while ago has our company (GEM Studio) considered a serious possibility of using Wordpress “a blogging tool” for creating a professional corporate web site. It really did come to this, and we have already started the development.
In Croatia most used open source custom management system is Joomla. Majority of those developers are beginners, and they don’t really understand the negative aspects of using Joomla. Some advanced developers have strong arguments why not to use Joomla. I”ll just mention what our competition is saying: majority of people can’t even pronounce Joomla correctly, majority of web sites created in Joomla don’t look even near to professional, they are very easy to hack, very difficult to customize. The only reason I am comparing the two (WordPress and Joomla) is they share most of this problems. The difference is that Wordpress is VERY close to overcoming them, and that’s great news.
Did you know that Wordpress is 17th most visited web site according to Alexa? Skipping Myspace.com, Microsoft.com, Ebay.com, Linkedin.com and even Flikcr.com and Craigslist.com and it is still continually growing. Maybe Wordpress will soon be called “webpress” by the amount of web sites pressed (created).
Wordpress, twitter, myspace, wix
It seems that soon you will be able to create what ever kind of website and manage the content with Wordpress. It also seems that Wordpress will become a platform for developing web site, managing content on which you can install thousands of plugins, widgets and addons. Few important things in this process.
1. SEO
Search engine optimization (onsite) should be on maximum for every web site created by wordpress. There should be a plugin for automatic creation and submission of XML Sitemaps towards the search engines. Meta tags, keywords, titles, smart url, and everything else that is created by default.
2. Social networking and bookmarking
It should be very easy to SHARE content with all the social networking and bookmarking services, and in combination with SEO, the content should be available imediatly via search engines.
3. Design
After getting as much visitors as you can the natural (non payed) way, you must make sure that the presentation is professional, and navigation is user friendly. This can be done with choosing the best template and easily customizing it to your needs. It seams, Wordpress is close to reaching that solution. They are highlighting this in version 3.0 (custom post types, custom taxonomies,).
There are other free online web developing tools like Wix (you can Google that) which are great. But, Wix doesn’t have that many users or that many plugins to make such an interesting platform. Today it’s all about the platforms. App store, Android Store, Google Apps marketplace, off-course Itunes and so on.
I will leave you with a killer idea for wordpress.com, create a platform for other developers to create plugins for wordpress and sell them for 1-10$.
