The largest search engine for work-from-home and freelance jobs DoNanza has released their quarterly State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy trends report. Based on their findings, WordPress is still the king when it comes to demand for use in projects as it had six times the amount of projects when compared with Joomla and Drupal. However, the report also shows that while Drupal has the least demand, project developers earn the most with an average project cost of $915.00. Joomla projects average $473.00 while WordPress averages $455.00.
One of the more fascinating statistics from this report is the site development as % of the total project. WordPress is the lowest at 18%, Joomla at 23% and Drupal with 31%. This means that Drupal users are looking for freelance support and development work from the get go as opposed to WordPress where users are attempting to build their sites themselves without outside development. This is a great stat for WordPress as it really shows how easy it is to work with the platform. It’s also a good sign of the rich third party community established around the platform where there is usually a theme or plugin that fits the needs of an individual.
On the flip side, there is the 3rd party development as % of total projects. Joomla leads the pack at 29%, Drupal at 20% and WordPress with 16%. According to DoNanza CEO Liran Kotzer,
“This proves that Joomla has a very active market allowing people to create and sell the third party extensions they have created for other Joomla platform users”
Being a former Joomla user myself, the Joomla community had a pretty good commercial market 3-4 years ago. In fact, it was so good that I felt as though if I wanted to do anything cool with Joomla, I had to pay for it. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be that way anymore but their commercial market is maturing. WordPress on the other hand is still in it’s infancy when we look at the commercial plugin/theme landscape. Sure, commercial themes have been offered for a few years and perhaps even a few plugins but the biggest difference between WordPress and Joomla when it comes to commercial offerings is that, the WordPress userbase has been accustomed to FREE. Free themes, free plugins, free GPL, the mind share in the WordPress community is all about free. However, during the course of this year and into the future, there will be an explosion of commercial plugins, themes and services centered around WordPress as that mind share barrier begins to erode. It’s a good thing to because there are some kick ass commercial products available for WordPress, such as GravityForms.
The report goes on to show that PHP, Translation, and HTML are still the top three requested skill sets. WordPress increased it’s rank by 1 at the number 7 spot.
I know that a large amount of consultants read WPTavern.com. What do you think of these trend results by DoNanza? Do they match well with what you’re seeing or do you think they have missed the boat?
I follow some WP job boards and see requests of both kinds: to build a site from scratch and to help out with a site where the client has started the work. There are also lots of requests for support and training. I’m not surprised that WP has the most requests, though: it has a larger user base than either Joomla or Drupal.