venturebeat.com/2013/07/27/19-percent-of-the-web-runs-on-wordpress/

First, I find this to be a very high number. but as an editorial comment directed not at JB, but at the Joomlaverse in general:

Second, (and I am not alone): I was hoping J3 would finally develop an administrative environment I could turn over to my clients. But in fact, this longstanding issue has not been addressed. at all. ('slightly less ugly' isn't 'better.') Some of my clients are engineers and architects, and when they are confronted with the admin panel of a J site, they are mostly overwhelmed and intimidated. (Imagine the reaction of my non-engineering clients!) So I have to hand it to WP for this: they have the CMS right. It is user friendly....and it is beautiful, and if that market penetration figure is correct, this might be the reason why.

Just sayin.'

I agree with you actually.

I'm keen to start moving our themes to WP as soon as possible. I've been wanting to do this for four years and never had the time but it really does seem that WP marketshare has grown considerably in the last one to two years.

I don't think 19% is too high but alot of that may well be the number of sites hosted on wordpress.com which will of course have a high degree of abandoned sites.

Anyway be keen to see what others here think about this. I know it's come up a lot on the Joomla mailing lists recently. Joomla is still a powerful tool but I think your observation about ease of use is key to it's future.

Thanks

I think the ease of front end design in J2.5 and J3+ is superior, so for me the designer, I feel like I can design anything, anything, I want in Joomla, which has not been my experience in WP. The environment created by ZGF and now T2 leverages this flexibility in a huge way. But once designed, I have a site I can't give to the clients because they are never going to touch the Joomla back end, which means I wind up doing it (for free) or training a low level 'SEO consultant' (for free). One plus - the free PowerAdmin plugin has been a nice add on to Isis, and has a small footprint. I think all of us would pay for a user-riendly administrative interface....heck, people are imploring rockettheme, offering them money, to get off their back ends and update the mission control back end, but so far they demur.