platforms Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

An interesting study released yesterday by Pingdom reveals that 49% of the top 100 blogs as ranked by Technorati are using WordPress as their CMS platform.

You can debate whether Technorati is still a decent ranking system, and it doesn’t include 8 sites for which information wasn’t available, but 40% of the sites with available information are on self-hosted WordPress (with 9% on WordPress.com’s hosted alternative). The article also has an informative list of what each of the top sites is actually running on – sadly TheWayoftheWeb just missed out on making the list, but for the record, I’ve been using self-hosted WordPress for a number of years now for pretty much all my sites (I do have one or two on both Blogger and Tumblr).

There are a number of reasons why I recommend self-hosted WordPress, including the fact that you have ultimate control over design, data etc, and as long as you’re backing up regularly, you’re better offer in the event of hosting/domain name failures.

It also gets increasingly easy to use – in addition to usability improvements to the core product, all the big third party theme providers and frameworks have made big steps in making everything quicker and easier to setup. Most of my sites currently run on the Genesis framework from StudioPress, but there are also great products I’ve been checking out from the likes of Headway and Pagelines, who are both offering drag and drop customisation.

More and more themes are now coming with responsive design as standard (meaning your site automatically works on mobile/tablets), and it’s really easy to find extremely talented designers and developers who are not only familiar with WordPress, but the relative ubiquity of it keeps prices fairly realistic. If you’re stuck for designers/developers I’m always happy to recommend several that I’ve enjoyed working with both on my own sites and client projects.

And that’s before you get into the various projects built on top of WordPress – for example, Jigoshop, a client of mine who produce a frankly amazing WordPress eCommerce solution. Not only can you install and set-up a fully functioning online store for free, but there’s an amazing range of extensions for it already which means your shop has all the services at a level you’d expect for a big online retailer.

And if you need some help, I can provide domain names and hosting, plus initial set-up for a low fee, having currently set up a number of sites for my own projects and for a range of friends and businesses, which regularly get many thousands of visitors each month, so feel free to contact me. I’ve also had experience of transferring sites from other platforms, and if you just want some quick tips, advice or reassurance, feel free to give me a shout!

At the moment it’s hard to know which events I’m guaranteed to attend – there’s a lot happening and my diary is subject to massive change at the last minute.

But I’ll definitely be at two upcoming conferences, as I’ve been kindly asked to host roundtables at both of them.

The first is the Specialist Media Conference on May 25th, which takes place in the delightful surroundings of Peterborough, about 5 minutes walk from one of my former employers. And the table I’m on will be all about mobile, hopefully discussing what lays beyond the iPhone, developing a mobile strategy and application development etc. What’s interesting is that the Specialist Media name brings to mind niche targeted magazines, but obviously websites, blogs, radio etc which have a defined belief and purpose are all specialist media outlets.

And then on June 1st, I’ll be on another round table at the M-Publishing event. This is going to be really interested as it’s part of a full schedule of mobile knowledge and insight. And in the midst of it all, each of five roundtables will be given the task of creating a mobile strategy for fictional publishers. And the other tables are being hosted by some very intelligent people: Nick Lane from MobileSQUARED, Belinda Parmer from LadyGeek, and my friends Jonathan MacDonald (JME.net) and Ilicco Elia (Reuters).

So it’s a bit handy I was able to share some news about one of Absolute Radio’s mobile apps (Cos that’s where I work). The Absolute Radio Player for Nokia phones has now been downloaded over 100,000 times by people who are not only lovely Absolute Radio listeners, but also happen to own a 3rd or 5th edition S60 handset. And considering it’s only been out for about 2.5 months, that’s not bad going. And it also goes someway to counteracting some of the oft-quoted figures on mobile which are using a U.S. audience, rather than European or global. Which will make Tomi Ahonen happy.

So hopefully I might see you at an upcoming event, and if not, just go and download the Absolute Radio iAmp for iPhone/Android or Absolute Radio Player for Nokia/BlackBerry.

49% of the world’s top 100 blogs are using WordPress

Upcoming events and a bit of mobile

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