Small business, blogs, bands, and news publications should all be thankful this week, because the very thing that likely helped them become what they are is celebrating a birthday.
The web is big. That internet thing we rely so heavily on is just so vastly big, it can be difficult to make sense of, and hard to quantify. It’s so big that it contains billions of webpages, of websites looking at all manner of things, from technology to lifestyle to cosmetics to music to news and current affairs, and of course, lots and lots of cats (and dogs, too).
But while you probably already know that the web is big, you may not know about what makes websites work, and for that we turn to code.
We all know that coding languages make applications and websites, and many of us are now sending our kids to school where they can learn to make the same sort of things from an early age, because it’s a life skill they’ll need, but the code under the web is made of lots of different types of code.
You can build websites from scratch and make them do lots of amazing things, and you can also choose to not make them from scratch and use a content management system, what is basically a program for websites that helps them to run news, articles, media, and information.
These days, most webpages will rely on one of these — a “CMS” — and there’s one sitting at heart of many websites: WordPress.
The stats aren’t always easy to find, but WordPress is one of the world’s and the web’s most popular content management systems, running on almost 30 percent of all websites out there.
That means over a quarter of the world’s websites are reliant on the WordPress platform, and locally that includes many sites you may already be visiting, including this one (though not all aspects of the sites are necessarily bound in WordPress).
And this week, it celebrates a milestone, turning 15, and starting back when the web was just beginning to make its way around to more people, before it became a standard service. This was before phones had a version of the web that made sense, that was visual, and long before social networks.
This was back when blogging was a new thing, and not everyone did it. WordPress was developed back then to help devise a stable platform for content makers and managers, and has grown into not just a stable platform, but one of the most trusted web platforms out there.
In fact, it’s the first place folks wanting to launch a new website will generally run to, as WordPress provides a fairly stable and solid base to build a website on, allowing you to start with a theme and tweak it, something that helped Australian company Envato make it big with its ThemeForest online store.
Essentially, if you use WordPress, say a little “happy birthday” under your breath or even out loud, because the platform of choice for so many news outlets, creative-types, businesses, bands, shops, and so much more is 15 this week.
