PERCEPTION OF VALUE.

Our consulting business supports a number of platforms. WordPress is our favorite CMS platform to date, but when people make the decision to use WordPress they seem to be making the choice to use a low cost solution. Clients thinking about adopting Drupal (or some of the closed source CMS solutions) seem to start with a notion of service costs being about 3-4x higher than WordPress.

I think there are two underlying factors:

(1) WordPress is still perceived as a blogging tool first, and a CMS second. Blogging sites are often perceived as the "simpler" and low cost option.

(2) WordPress' greatest asset - its incredible admin ease of use, the ability for novices to do an incredible amount of basic customization, quality of many free plug-ins and themes - creates the sense that costs for even advanced customization are very low.

The more we can do to promote (in the showcase and elsewhere) advanced CMS implementations that aren't blogging centric and that beginners can't create with a few clicks the more we can change that perception.