This post would have been a lot more interesting if all the sites using WordPress were linked-but, I believe that the list is probably right. My only question is why haven’t any of these government agencies hired The Next Wave to do their sites- since we are an SDVOB and HUBzone?
Here is a list (probably not all-inclusive) of United States government agencies or organizations using WordPress (whether privately or publicly):
* Air Force
* Army
* Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
* Coast Guard
* Defense Intelligence Agency
* Department of Energy
* Department of Homeland Security
* Department of State
* Department of Treasury
* Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
* Marine Corps
* Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
* National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
* National Reconnaissance Agency
* National Security Agency (NSA)
* Navy
This list was revealed at WordCamp San Francisco, 2008.
U.S. Government Agencies Using WordPress « Mark on WordPress.
While the seasoned WP person can usually tell if a site is done in WP or not- some rookies can’t tell. An easy way to find out is just try adding /wp-admin after the primary URL and see if it takes you to the login panel.
As professional web developers of both the Joomla! and WordPress Content Management Systems (CMS) we come across many different surveys and comparisons of the two. Water and Stone poses the question “What is the most popular open source content management system?” and actually uses statistics to provide an unbiased report.
If you’ve ever wondered if WordPress and Joomla! truly are the best pieces of software that we could be using, then take a look at this survey. In the first few pages you’ll read “that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But don’t just take that as proof, look at some of the stats that are given throughout the 51 page paper.
Search Engine Visibility
The Next Wave’s core competency compared to other web hosting and design firms in the Dayton area is that we focus on getting our clients on the front page of Google. Sure, you can have a great looking website, but if no one can see it what’s the point? So, one of the first thing we looked for in this survey was any information on search engine ranking for WordPress and Joomla!.
Joomla! comes out on top with more than 1 million inbound searched links at the time of the survey, with WordPress right behind with 403,000. Notice phpnuke and MediaWiki with more than a million links as well, however these are “black hat” search engine optimization techniques that were implemented to create and keep inbound links permanent to skew search.
Do a search for “Content Management System”, and Joomla! comes up second in Google. A search for “Blog Software” (or a variant of that) and WordPress is right up there on top. This just shows that the websites that provide these two are strong in search engine optimization and Google loves to read from them. If you have a website powered by them, Google will love your site too (provided you continually update).
You can also see what people are searching for on Google, and the results that turn up for those searches. The top two systems? You guessed it, WordPress and Joomla! with a huge margin of difference from the third CMS on the list Drupal.
Ratings
OpenSourceCMS.com has a list of all of these and allows visitors to rate and comment on the various ones that are in use. For ratings, WordPress comes out on top with a rating of 4.4 out of 5. Joomla!’s up there too, with 4.2 out of 5.
Brand Strategy
“The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names. The data collected in this portion of the survey shows that in almost every way the mind share in today’s market is dominated by just three brands: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.”
WordPress and Joomla! are at the top of everything in this survey. Their branding is superb and still growing, their ranks and ratings are high above the rest of the pack, and both have HUGE community groups that help to make the two CMS’s more stable, more flexible, and even better for web development than other systems. The next time someone says that Joomla! and WordPress aren’t good for web design, tell them otherwise. The facts are there, leading edge developers realize these systemsenable amazing work for clients in at minimum- half the time as building a website from scratch.
Read this, read it again if you want to. Print it out and pass it to your co-workers or show it to your boss so that he/she will let you start using WordPress or Joomla!. And if you’re interested in learning more about the systems, come to our next Websitetology seminar and we’ll give you the crash course that will set your business on top.
Once your site gets popular, the next problem is comment spam. It’s all Google’s fault for giving points to inbound links- no mater what the connection (give or take). Spammers will say the stupidist things just to get a link back to their site- or even something innocuous like “Nice site, I’ll be back” or some other compliment that adds nothing to the conversation. These suck- because if you have people subscribed to comments- they all get these stupid messages as well.
Spam Karma 2 is still the mac daddy of all spam killers in our book- but, it’s lead developer, Dr. Dave has decided to throw in the towel- which is really too bad. Too many WordPress updates were making his life a living hell. It’s too bad the core dev team believes it’s their way or the highway- because his spam killer works better than Akismet (from the developers of WordPress, which has a funky license- it’s not quite free).
Mollom is in Beta- and my friend D’Arcy Norman is giving it a test run. So far, it’s not SK2- but, remember- that’s what Beta means. Here’s what they say on the Mollom site:
The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop comment and contact form spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community. Mollom is currently in public beta.
There are different philosophies on comment moderation- we tend to recommend that you let spam filtered comments post automatically- as soon as they’ve been screened by your filter- no human intervention. Every once in a while something gets through- but, in general, the speed of conversation gets your network going faster than waiting for you to moderate.
Many corporations are scared to let the unmoderated comments post- but, that’s bunk. If they want to say something crappy about your brand- they’ll either say it on your site, or elsewhere- where you may not be able to respond or correct it.