DMR #18: Jeffrey Samorano – Is WordPress the right CMS for the majority of businesses?

David: Is WordPress the right CMS for the majority of businesses? Should you use a theme framework or should you have your own theme designed from scratch? What WordPress plugins are most important in 2014? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask today's special guest, Jeffrey Samorano. Jeffrey, welcome to DMR. Jeffrey: Thanks for having me. David: Jeffrey is a part designer, part WordPress programmer, bringing balance and vision to projects. His strength is managing client expectations by seeing the vision of the bigger picture. Jeffrey, what's the bigger picture for WordPress? Will it continue to be the CMS of choice for more and more businesses moving forward? Jeffrey: Honestly, in my opinion, I think it is. It's got some great traction. It's complete. I mean, what is it, 60 million websites now are running WordPress. I don't think it's planning on slowing at all. It's pretty much dominating. David: It's the place to be. Nothing's going to take it over at any point to the near future. Jeffrey: Yeah. David: How long have you actually been designing sites using WordPress yourself? Jeffrey: We've been designing sites for over 10 years, but working with WordPress specifically, for just under eight years now. David: Wow. That's still quite a long time. I published my first WordPress site in 2007, so that was seven years ago. That's quite a long time ago as well but eight years is even longer. Why did you actually choose then eight years ago to move on to WordPress? What was it about that particular CMS? Because really, it was just a blogging platform at the time, wasn't it? What persuaded you that that was going to be really worthwhile to focus on? Jeffrey: You know, that's an awesome question. I'm glad you asked it because I've had those discussion with a lot of our clients and they've asked, "Well, why should I use WordPress? Why not Joomla or Drupal or something like that?" Really, what it came down to it, we started back when websites were made in tables and strict HTML, and then CSS came out. That was always advancing and then PHP and other scripts like that. It always got more and more.