WordPress turned 10 yesterday. Hard to believe, really. Seems like it was just a couple years ago that I built my first Geocities site. A horrible mess of blinking and flashing pretending to be a record label, it was a pretty cool project when I was 16. As you can guess, that was a lot more than a couple years ago and the web has evolved greatly. Anyone can have a slick looking, properly functioning website now and, for the most part, we have WordPress to thank for that.

Not just a blogging platform, WordPress is a fully functional content management system that powers over 18% of the web. When you think about it, that’s a staggering number. WordPress stats claims over 66 million sites, and that’s just on WordPress.com, it doesn’t even count self-hosted sites such as this one. I’d guess that 66 million is nowhere near the actual number.

WordPress has given countless people the ability to build an online business. Mashable started as a WordPress blog. The same goes for TheNextWeb, TechCrunch and more. It’s given me an additional income stream, as I enjoy building and customizing sites that work for small business (Need one? Get in touch). It’s taught me to understand code. It’s given countless small businesses the ability to sell products online and manage every aspect of their own business. In short, it’s changed a lot of lives and had a huge impact on the online world.

In celebration of this huge milestone, Manage WP is giving away the farm. Their huge WordPress 10th Anniversary Giveaway includes prizes from WPMUDEV, Elegant Themes, Arvixe Hosting, Sucuri and Manage WP. Enter here.

Bonus contest: Elmastudio is giving away 5 of their premium WordPress themes. Just leave a comment about why you like WordPress here.

Do you know of any other celebration giveaways? Post them in the comments.