About a week ago, my Twitter stream was overtaken by just one topic.

I follow people who work with many different types of web software. That day, they all had one thing in common. They were all tweeting about Ghost, a new blogging platform that was raising money on Kickstarter.

Ghost has no live demo and it's heavily based on two fairly obscure tools: Node.js and markdown.

However, it flew past it's Kickstarter goal inside one day and has now raised over £100,000.

Why is the idea of Ghost so popular with so many different people? Because it promised a renewed focus on simplicity. The truth is that in 2013 even web experts want simpler software.

Many sites have no menus How simple are many websites in 2013? Very, very simple. Until now we've often thought of menus of being the foundation stone of a website. That's no longer true. Via WordPress.com we get some fascinating statistics. 76% of sites have no menus at all

18% have 1 menu

6% have 2 more more menus

Thanks to Joey Kudish and lessbloat for putting these statistics together.

Many sites have no sidebars Not only navigation, but also design is becoming simpler. How can you tell if a website was designed in the last 3 years? It has no sidebars. That's a little bit of an over-simplification, but it's not too far from the truth. Some of the leading design sites, such as AListApart.com not only have no sidebars on their articles, they don't have room for much of their logo:

The new WordPress theme called Twenty Thirteen lacks sidebars by default. It was explicity designed to work best with a single column layout. WordPress powers about 22% of all new websites and standard will be sidebar-free. You can see the demo here: http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com.

What are people actually using? Below is a screenshot from Google Trends. The red line is Tumblr and the blue line is WordPress:

I don't think it's any coincidence at all that WordPress wants to become more like Tumblr. The WordPress team listen to their users. They know what people want. Brad Frost has a great presentation that I've embedded below. He presents daily figures some of the largest platforms on the web. The simpler something is, the more it gets used: 500,000 WordPress posts

40 million Tumblr posts

500 million Tweets

4 billion Facebook shares