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by Jolie O’Dell @Mashable
Some very interesting stats have just emerged about the freelance and contract market for CMS developers and designers.
In its quarterly market report, freelance site DoNanza discovered that even though WordPress devs, designers and SEO pros are in greater demand than their Drupal or Joomla counterparts — and even though WordPress outnumbers Drupal and Joomla in the number of projects for each CMS — Drupal web professionals on average make around twice what WordPress pros make per project.
The full report, called the State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy, looked at CMSes used by various professionals in a range of web-work specializations. It also ranked the most requested job skills right now.
On average, all CMS projects in DoNanza’s universe grew almost 50% quarter over quarter. The number of WordPress projects grew 61%; Joomla projects grew 38%; and Drupal projects grew 26%.
And that’s just growth. When you look at the actual number of projects, WordPress projects account for six and a half times the number of Drupal projects. (The actual number of Joomla projects was almost exactly between the other two CMSes.)
However, Drupal projects have higher budgets. The average WordPress project pays the freelancer in question around $455, while a Drupal freelancer makes around $915 per project.
If we extrapolate based on those numbers, we can see that WordPress still accounts for the lion’s share of the CMS/freelance economy, even through Drupal wins on potential earnings per project.
Another interesting section of the report detailed the most requested skills for developers, designers and other web professionals. Among the 50 top skills, the biggest rises and drops are indicative of trends in the market.
For example, .NET dropped 6 rankings, and MySQL sank 4 places. However, Android soared 20 full percentage points, and jQuery jumped 16 positions. Another big gainer was iPad, which rose 12 places. Check out the full report to get all the rankings.
If you’re a dev or designer working with one or more of these CMSes, do these stats and budgets line up with your real-world experience? Let us know in the comments.