Sponsor Spotlight: LightSpeed WordPress Development

LightSpeed WordPress Development (also known as lsdev.biz), is a specialist WordPress Web development studio based in Cape Town. LightSpeed and founder/owner Ashley Shaw are the organising sponsors of this year’s WordCamp.

Tell us a bit about your business. How do you use WordPress?

LightSpeed specializes in WordPress & BuddyPress development. We use this software to build just about any kind of website from magazine community portals to fully fledged e-commerce solutions and everything inbetween. Our main areas of focus are business, e-commerce, communities and large publishers.

Why WordPress?

The key to success is focus, working on too many different CMSs doesn’t help in becoming an expert. Jack of all trades, master of none. That doesn’t mean we haven’t tried other CMSs. We have tried all the major systems, with two prominent examples being Drupal and Joomla and while both excellent systems in their own right, we prefer WP by a long shot. Not only is WordPress easy to use for clients (and ourselves),  it also has a  huge community of active developers that are guaranteed to continue pushing boundaries and keep WordPress ahead of the pack.

Why did you decide to get involved and organise WordCamp Cape Town 2011?

At LightSpeed we are passionate about WordPress and the ethos of Open Source. Hosting and sponsoring WordCamp is a unique opportunity to organise an event that will help change the WordPress landscape in South Africa. We want to encourage collaboration, openness of brands and of course business opportunities.

What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?

There is a lot of room for growth, but I feel that we have some incredible WP skill coming out of SA. The WordPress community as a whole never ceases to amaze and inspire. What we find most interesting is that it’s not developers and geeks that make up the majority of the community  – it’s end users. Website owners, site editors, bloggers. They are the major driving force behind the community.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?

Bringing WP fans together and inspiring WP greatness.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Dan Milward from Instinct, they have built an amazing product and community.

What is the most exciting improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?

Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies have changed the way we work with WordPress. These features have helped make WordPress become more of a CMS proper. When people ask me if Drupal is better, they usually refer to the fact that it does custom content types… My response is that WordPress does too. This feature was introduced in version 3.0 and has matured very well in version 3.1 and 3.2.

Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?

Powering 30% of the world’s websites and being even more of a dominant CMS in the world market. As a result, better support for WordPress in web applications and a more extensive API for allowing for even further integration. Currently WordPress powers around 15% of all sites running a CMS on the web, with a 54% market share relative to other non-bespoke CMS’s (three times more than both Joomla and Drupal combined) and we hold strong to our prediction that WordPress will continue to grow it’s position as the worlds most popular CMS.