WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform in 2003 that eventually turned into a mainstream publishing platform. It allowed ordinary people to to tell their story by getting online quickly, at little cost. Today it is more of a fully-fledged CMS. Yet many, especially those in IT (information technology), only see WordPress as a blog, not a professional website or a shopping cart. This perhaps re-confirms that WordPress is for business owners and marketers, not IT people. It’s technology for the masses, not the geeks.
From around 2008 WordPress started to go beyond blogging. When V3.0 arrived in May 2010, it had the ability to compete head-on with most traditional website content-management solutions. V3.1 in 2011 had a record 15 million downloads! In the US market, almost one in four new websites now run WordPress, with almost half being true content-managed ‘sites’ not blogs.
In fact today, 92% of all new users now use WordPress primarily for it’s CMS website features, hence the explosion in sales of professional themes. The built-in ‘blogging’ tools are still used, to help tell their story and ensure they keep getting good search traffic…
WordPress certainly won’t suit everyone – Just 90% of the market…
And WordPress is used not just by bloggers and small businesses, but has the trust of corporates too. e.g.
Auckland WordPress User Group 