On Monday this week, the WordPress platform hit a milestone: it’s now been around for ten years!

More impressive than that is the number of sites that are powered by the WordPress platform. Since its inception, it’s grown to a full-fledged content management system, capable of running your entire site. By some estimates, no less than 18% of the Web is running on WP. That amounts to millions of sites. Not bad for a plucky little blog engine!

To celebrate, we thought we’d take a look at some of the biggest misconceptions about WP. 10 years later, we still run into prejudices and erroneous beliefs about the world’s favorite content management system. The following quotes are things we’ve actually heard, verbatim, from clients and prospects.

Misconception #1: It’s for beginners only

“I don’t really care to blog about what I had for dinner last night. What good is WordPress to me?”

While it’s true that WP can be (and is) used for a lot of personal blogs, there’s so much more that it can do. Big, big name brands use WordPress to power their blogs and other portions of their sites, including eBay, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Samsung.

Misconception #2: It’s too simple for anything but a blog

“My old Web guy built me a site on the WordPress platform, so it doesn’t do very much. We need a better solution.”

Lots of Web shops will set up their clients with a WordPress site, but then neglect to train and educate them on how to use it. As a result, the client comes away feeling like WP is just too limited for their needs. In reality, WP can be extended to do all kinds of things, from running forums, online directories, even to running a small online store. As we said often in the Denver WordPress meetup, “There’s a plugin for that!” Which leads us to our third point…

Misconseption #3: It’s easy for a layman to make it do anything they want

“I just need a few minutes of your time to show me how to build this complicated application.”

While it’s true that WP can be molded to fit a lot of what you need, there’s often a good deal of programming that has to happen in order to achieve your goals. Many times a client has come to us with a very specific need, and we’ve gone on to build a custom plugin to suit because the right solution just wasn’t out there yet. The end result is something that’s easy for the client to use, but getting it to that point took a lot of sweat.

We’ll look at this last point in further detail next week.

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To wrap all of this up, here’s the attitude about WordPress that we’d like to leave you with:
WP is flexible and scalable enough to handle many Web application needs, from the mom-and-pop shop to enterprise-level solutions. Some things are easy for the site owner to install and set up, but some things take an experienced professional’s touch.

Photo Credit: milos milosevic via Compfight cc