Wordpress is the Orange Juice of Content Management Systems
Did You Ever Wonder Why Orange Juice is the Breakfast Drink?
The largest advertising company in North America in 1908 was Lord & Thomas, who had a client California Fruit Growers Exchange. They had a large surplus of oranges which was causing prices to plummet. They needed to sell oranges, quickly, and to a much larger market than they had.
At the time oranges were only eaten as a fruit, by peeling and enjoying it in segments. It was not a fruit with which you could bake, which was how other fruits were marketed. So what other options were there? Well, Lord & Thomas put their best creative minds together and came up with a revolutionary campaign, with the headline “Drink an Orange”. This gave the market a brand new beverage, which was ideal for breakfast. The messaging for the campaign convinced the audience that not only was the juice delicious but it was recommended by physicians for its health benefits.
“ As an added incentive, [Lord & Thomas] actually hired a man to invent a juice extractor, and the print ads offered those glass juice extractors for just 10 cents a piece. It was an ingenious marketing idea. [Lord & Thomas] sold 3 million of them almost overnight.” - CBC.ca
What Does This Have To Do With Wordpress?
In 2020, over 455 million websites use WordPress.com. That means that the WordPress market share is 35% of all websites in the world! This is an increase of 2% compared to 2019 and a 4% rise from the previous year. Also, over 20% of all self-hosted websites are currently using WordPress. - Creative Minds
(update 3 November 2021: WordPress now powers almost 43% of the web, with a total of 708 million websites. Source: Manaferra)
Because Wordpress was the first to offer tools to create websites with little to no programming knowledge, and for free, it exploded into the market. It soon became the CMS of choice because everyone’s friend’s brother’s child could “develop” a website for a few hundred dollars.
Wordpress ambassadors (1) have marketed the platform as the best CMS with the following messaging:
- It is relatively inexpensive to get developed
- Wordpress developers (2) are readily available
- It has a large online support community
- Any feature or functionality is possible (3)
- It is easy to manage content (4)
- It is inexpensive to host a Wordpress Website
Is it though?
My only conclusion here is: Don’t drink orange juice with your breakfast out of habit - find out what other options are available to you so that you can get the best out of your meal!
Annotations:
- I use the term “ambassadors” for the many digital agencies, web development companies, and developers that have not really looked beyond Wordpress as CMS options. It is a choice often based on the development skills available to them rather than what is best for the requirements.
- Wordpress offers tools to develop websites without programming knowledge. Therefore, it is an important step to vet a developer as an actual programmer or coder before hiring them to develop your Wordpress website.
- Wordpress was initially created as a blogging platform. Therefore its core functionality includes “pages” and “posts”. Anything beyond that, including sliding banners, is an additional piece of software that is added to the Wordpress core software, known as “plugins”. This creates some risk to the website, as plugins are developed by different developers, and have version updates that are not coordinated. In addition, having many plugins can negatively impact the performance of the website.
- This is a misconception. After having vetted many CMS platforms, I can confidently say that Wordpress is not near the top of the list when we sort based on ease-of-use. Wordpress is for those that are already familiar with it. Additionally, developers have different approaches to how they make content editable within Wordpress, so that can also make it challenging for editors.
Do you have any questions on the above, or would you like to share your experience? Just email ideas@mawazo.ca or call +1 (833) 503-0807.
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