WordPress.com has grown rapidly over the years and continues to do so, but even with a major success story under its belt, creator Automattic has been on the offensive more than ever lately to defend its crown.
Long gone are the days of WordPress operating like a blogging platform, but even after its transition to a full-blown content management system (CMS), things keep changing. Just this year Automattic has taken to marketing its CMS directly to bands, weddings, cities and as of today, restaurants.
Automattic is pitching more than just a handful of specialized themes. Instead, it’s selling an ideology: an everything for everyone service, and it’s moving one vertical at a time.
For restaurants, Automattic now offers the ability for owners to literally manage their food menu — not only their nav menu — right from the WordPress dashboard, in addition to perks like OpenTable integration. The company’s example certainly looks beautiful; it’s everything your city band wedding restaurant needs.
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This follows WordPress’ Sites for Cities initiative, which ships with commonly needed pages pre-installed, like Parks & Recreation, City Hall, and Law Enforcement. Administrators just have to fill in the blanks.
What you’re seeing is a preview of a new wave of WordPress sites. Highly specialized and highly targeted. This approach allows Automattic to preserve much of WordPress’ flexibility, while easing in new recruits and avoiding feature bloat.
Right now only 17.4% of the top one million sites run on WordPress, but Automattic wants true Web domination. This is how the company hopes to make that happen.
➤ Sites for Restaurants via WordPress
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