According to Automattic founder and president, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress should be powering the majority of all websites. Tiger Global Management thinks so too. It’s only been months since they paid $50 million for a secondary stake in the WordPress.com maker Automattic, and they just threw in another $60 million in shares purchased from Polaris Partners. The investment management firm clearly has a similar goal in mind for WordPress and Mullenweg is determined to grow Automattic and grow it fast.
“Their [Tiger’s] deep resources, market experience, and long-term outlook make them an ideal partner for the next phase of Automattic and the continued growth of the WordPress ecosystem,” Mullenweg wrote recently in a blog post. “What we’re building will take time and it won’t be easy, but things worth doing seldom are.”
Mobile factors heavily in the long term plans of WordPress, just as it does for Joomla! and Drupal, but out of all the content management systems (145 and counting) the big WP has 58.3% of the CMS market trailed dramatically by Joomla! (9.5%) and Drupal (5.8%). Everyone else falls well below and increasingly it looks like WordPress will grow just as the development communities that support it have grown.
As this is a tall order and given that over 65% of all websites are either using a “home grown” CMS or no CMS at all, there seems to be room for several top platforms to grow. However, despite how powerful WordPress.com is, many businesses find that meeting their needs requires functions or capabilities better met by other systems. The most difficult part for organizations deciding on which platform to use, is sorting through them with a clear knowledge of how to match the right platform with their business needs.
Even after deploying your system of choice, the popularity of the top content management systems has also served up a target hard for the hacking community to resist. As such the top two are also the ones with the greatest security risks. Help Net Security reported a recently discovered backdoor with brute-forcing capabilities that searches the Internet for WordPress and Joomla! websites with weak administrative passwords in order to turn them into malware and phishing sites. It is the sheer number of available targets that causes hackers to favor attacking the top couple content management systems more than those with fewer deployments.
When it comes time for you to build your next web, or upgrade your old one, it pays to employ development and management teams well versed in the capabilities, as well as, the issues facing these new engines of web commerce.
Outsourcing the development and/or management of systems like WP to well established offshore firms can often provide you with the right kind of knowledge to get the most out of your web, while keeping it secure. They can offer services at far lower rates than U.S. based development companies, and employ developers who have benefited from intense technology focused educations. Several of these firms have established U.S. based project management teams that keep communications clear, while still taking advantage of lower offshore development prices.
The deep experience these firms bring in the areas of superior functionality and security offer your organizations a way to sort through the options, make sound business decisions on what to deploy and provide cost effective management of highly secure webs.
But if you wish to choose yourself, choose wisely. With 145 choices (see them here), a outside expert might just save you a sleepless night or two.
Brought to you by UBNSoft, leaders in software application development, deployment and management.
