What is WordPress?

Put quite simply, WordPress is an open source software program that powers around 32% of all websites around the world.

Since WordPress was launched in 2003 as a newly emerging blogging platform, this web-building tool has evolved into nothing short of a phenomenon, outgrowing its original purpose and becoming driven by a large community of developers creating an almost unlimited plethora of plugins and WordPress specialised hosting providers. While bloggers are still WordPress’s core audience, a growing number of businesses choose to trust the popular web builder.

WordPress mostly caters to small and medium websites, although it has proven it can handle much larger projects as well. Industry giants like Mercedes, Sony and Mozilla all use the vast web building capabilities that WordPress has to offer and major brands like the BBC, MTV, Sony and Walt Disney all rely on their services.

WordPress has been described as being the ‘Swiss Knife’ of web building, allowing website builders like ourselves to take a bare bone WordPress installation and transform it into an online shop, a photo gallery, a news website or any other type of website you can imagine.

Since WordPress developed and released the WooCommerce plugin, the eCommerce plugin has swept the market and now dominates the online store builder charts with a huge 22% market share of all eCommerce stores around the world.

Here at The Smart Hand, we feel that WordPress is the future for building websites and whilst our humble beginnings started out building Joomla based websites, our preference moving forward is with WordPress. However, we will continue to develop, maintain and support Joomla websites for as long as the market demands.