Websites of Independent Candidates for Irish General Election 2011

The Irish General Election is only a couple of weeks away, and RTE News reports that this year sees a surge in Independent candidates :

• 233 Independent & Smaller Party candidates
• 75 FF
• 104 FG
• 68 Labour
• 43 Greens
• 41 Sinn Fein

I decided to take the Independent candidates and establish how many of them are using WordPress as their Content Managment System.

First of all I established the candidates and their websites or lack thereof :

• 169 – total Independent Candidates
• 84 – Candidates without a website
• 85 – Candidate with a website

So regardless of other online presence – just over 50% of candidates have no website. Taking those 85 candidates that do have a website, I wrote a quick script that searched the home page of their site – and looked for the obvious DNA that one would expect with the most obvious Content Management Systems. Where this was not obviously available – I actually looked at the source and came to my own conclusions.

The results are shown below:

So WordPress implementations (both self-hosted and originating out of wordpress.com) seem to be the most popular branded CMS in use by candidates – with just over 28% of sites.