The new homepage for WordPress.org is live. It’s a working prototype, and I like the way Matt put it on his blog: “What’s on the page today actually isn’t that important, even though it’s better in many ways, the key is that it’s changing again, the stone has been unstuck and can now keep rolling.”
My hope is that this quick project (it started at WordCamp US contributor day) continues and the WordPress Marketing team can continue to iterate, to better sell WordPress from a page that gets a great number of pageviews every day.
WordPress needs to manage the conversion funnel just like any other business. I’m not unique in talking about this concept, but I did at WordCamp US in 2015. The initial conversion (trying WordPress) requires: Awareness > Interest > Desire > Action. With bad marketing — including marketing website design — we’re losing plenty of potential WordPress users somewhere between awareness and action.
One of the ways to keep WordPress on an upward trend is to compete with other systems from a marketing standpoint. Proprietary CMSs are spending tens of millions of dollars to get their name out there; miraculously WordPress is widely used without any of that.
Before the WordPress community begins more heavy handed marketing tactics to put it on a more level playing field, it’s important to take care of things that are much simpler, like the design of the WordPress website. Getting unstuck from a site that hasn’t been changed in years is a good first step.
