Wordpress

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Technology: Keep on track with what they currently doing.

Performance: Keep on track with what they currently doing.

Price: Since WordPress is dominating the market for CMS, they have certain power toward the price of the product. WordPress could increase the premium and VIP account price or the price to own domain name up to the best possible price in order to maximize their profit.

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IV. Options Evaluation

Status Quo

Advance Technology

Increase Price

Pros

- Customers are happy about their current way of business. Not changing the platform will keep the fans stay.

- Huge market share

- Already profitable

- Fast growing as it is

- Potential profit from expanding target markets.

- Ability to compete with Joomla and Drupal in the future, when there is a possibility that wed design and coding knowledge become general knowledge to everyone.

- Maximize profits

- Extra profits could be used to advertising, developing the software, expand the community, etc.

Cons

- Market changes every day. No guarantee that current platform will still be successful in the future.

- Miss the potential profit from increasing price.

- Potential rejection from current users, who are fans of the original platform.

- Potential rejection from existing plugins, widgets and themes developers. New technical features mean these developers will have to adjust accordingly to the new version. There also a possibility that they lose the sale of the existing plugins, widgets and themes.

- Potential of technology incompatibility between different versions of plugins, widgets and themes.

- Have to re-educate the users on how to use the new version. Extra customer service effort is needed.

- Extra effort on marketing.

- Potential rejection from the current users since WordPress premium account and cost of domain name now is cheaper than of others. Increasing the price may cause user to switch over to competitors.

- Potential rejection from cooperate developers. If customers turn away from WordPress, the developers will stress the issue onto WordPress company.

- Extra effort on marketing needed to re-position WordPress to higher market segment.

V. RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the comparison between options, tt is best recommend that WordPress keep their status quo since they are doing just great and there is no immediate need to change. The following are more detail recommendations for WordPress to address the issues they currently have.

Security: Since WordPress should improve on security issues which include threatening malicious software and malwares. Having more secured system would ensure user confidence and reliability.

Social Media: It should add more pins for users to be able to share their work on different social media platforms by partnering up with more social sites. More options and variety than its competitors would gain more users due to flexibility.

Mobile: WordPress should work on improving the performance of their app. WordPress app does not have very good review from the heavy users on Google Store. Users report that the app is slow, buggy, lag, etc. More features should be added since the mobile apps does not have as much feature as the software have.

Marketing & Advertising: WordPress should increase their budget on Marketing and Advertising. Currently WordPress does not pay much attention about marketing and advertising possibly due to its dominance of the market. However, maintaining their status in the industry is one of the most important factors for WordPress to keep growing and staying on top in the market. It is worthy to remind current customers, create more awareness of new customers and motivate competitors' customers to switch over to WordPress. For instance, encouraging existing bloggers to create their own website by giving them incentives for example free services for a certain time etc. Also, offering promotional offer for premium and VIP accounts to attract and motivate users to subscribe to their services could benefit as well.

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