The commercial arm of WordPress announced that they were entering the website building business. The announcement was generally not well received by the WordPress web development community. Many softened their response and saw the opportunity as more information.
WordPress business
People consider WordPress as a company that develops an open source content management system (CMS) called WordPress. But WordPress is more than an open source development community hosted on WordPress.org.
An advantage is also for the site that is hosted on a WordPress.com domain that offers website hosting and domain name registration, among other related services.
The WordPress.com business is a part of a large collection of WordPress related businesses that are under the automatic umbrella.
Sister sites run by Automat include other businesses such as WooCommerce, Gravatar, Jetpack and Akismet.
The automatic slogan is:
“We don’t make software for free, we make it for freedom.”
Made by wordpress
The WordPress ecosystem has flourished as web developers and programmers contributed to the creation and testing of open source WordPress CMS and in return they have a great software offering web design services, plugins and themes.
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But now the WordPress brand is being used to sell web development, which is a step beyond offering plugins or hosting.
The service is called Made by wordpress.
According to the official web page:
“Whether you need a fast and demonstrative eCommerce store for your products and / or services, a polished website for your professional services firm, or an educational website for your online courses, our experts can find it on your WordPress.com Can make for … “
Website building plans
The built-in WordPress site offers three types of “website building schemes” that focus on three types of sites.
- online stores
- Educational sites
- Business services
This includes eCommerce, online courses, educational sites and professional services websites. That last category, professional services websites can be local brick and mortar sites such as yoga studios or moving companies.
The landing page states that “Engagement Manager“The website building project is assigned to who acts as the point person.
Websites start at $ 4,900. But strangely, the offering is made at limited capacity.
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By site:
“Custom websites start at $ 4,900, but currently space is limited as soon as it starts the new service.”
The web development community responded
An important issue raised in the community is the perception that the web development community helped create WordPress. Turning around for WordPress and starting competing against them is like using your own work against them.
One person tweeted:
“See the business model of automatic has changed. Feel for developers it will affect. While wordpress created wordpress[dot]Com platform and project management, it is the unpaid dev community that created it and delegated it to what they market and capitalize on. “
See the business model of automatic has changed. Feel for developers it will affect. While wordpress created wordpress[dot]Com platform and project management, it is the unpaid dev community that created it and delegates what they market and capitalize on. https://t.co/nLxIysu66E
– Philip Joyner (@filljoyner) 5 January 2021
Someone else compared Automatic and WordPress to Amazon and how Amazon built its products to compete against retailers selling on its platform.
This is the open source version of copying Amazon’s popular products and converting them to “Amazon Basics” to take advantage away from sellers. This is unnecessary, predatory and unfair trade practice. The devil’s advocate advocates for the devil.
– Morten Wears A Mask (@ mor10) January 4, 2021
The other issue is the notion that the use of the open source WordPress.org project domain name through the use of the WordPress brand is used by automatics, presumably confusing consumers unaware that WordPress.com differs from WordPress.org is.
Absolutely ridiculous that they do this IMO. If they wanted it not to be on https://t.co/XtTfaMjzSO.
No one else in the domain can use “WordPress”.
It’s like “Hey, you all made WordPress popular, now we’re going to steal your customers.
– Jack Kittering (@codemonkey_jack) January 4, 2021
There are two things to play here:
1. Trademark and naming confusion is difficult for non-insiders to understand. Com is not an open source project.
2. Unfair trade advantage for the sole exclusive use of the said trademark when competing with market vendors.– Morten Wears A Mask (@ mor10) January 4, 2021
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WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said the product is meant to compete with companies like Squarespace, where people can change at the entry level to build online businesses.
The goal, then, is to place new businesses within the WordPress ecosystem, as opposed to buying in the Wix and Squarespace markets where there is absolutely no market for WordPress developers.
I would be very surprised if this affects someone’s consulting business, if you have a current or potential client holiday for it, please let me know – it should be all new-to-WP users that should not be successful.
– Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 4, 2021
Others were looking at the bright side of the announcement as to whether WordPress.com would open the program up to white label work by trusted agencies. Matt indicated that he was open to her.
How does an agency get involved so that they can get referrals from this service? What is the $ 4,900 agency deduction? Who handles the customer during and after development? What does the package consist of? Why is this something https://t.co/DoK7RXvK3t needs to be done
– Scott Carter (@ sc456a) 5 January 2021
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It is not clear that anyone wants this yet, so there is not yet so much for this experiment. Will definitely try to open it if it works.
– Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) 5 January 2021
The entire community was not against development. Some commented that it did not represent a head-on competition with the WordPress development community, as it was about competing against companies like Wix and placing more of the Internet within the WordPress ecosystem.
Quotes
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Let Our Experts Build Your Dream Website
Official created by wordpress page
Made by wordpress