PHP still holds the No. 1 spot (as it has since February), but what’s more interesting are the “movers and shakers” this month. In particular, jobs in the “Graphic Design” and “Adobe Flash” categories have leaped up the index this month to end up in second and third places overall (up ten and six spots from last month, respectively) — this is good news for designers. Another big mover is jobs in the “Joomla!” category (breaking into the top 10 by rising 10 places to eighth), suggesting that there’s increasing demand for people skilled in the open-source CMS.

It’s more of a mixed bag for writers: While “Copywriting” (up 11 places to 23rd), “Editing” (up 16 spots to 48th)  and “Proofreading” (up 15 spots to 44th) are all winners, “Article Writing” (down five places to 7th) and “Online Writing” (down 12 places to 29th) are dropping down the index.

While some of these categories sound too similar to take this index all that seriously (how different is “Online Writing” from “Web Content,” really?) and you should remember that this is taking into account only jobs posted on one site, it’s still worth noting as a snapshot of the current freelance marketplace.

Here’s the Elance Online Work Index Top 10 for July.

1. PHP (–)
2. Graphic Design (+10)
3. Adobe Flash (+6)
4. MySQL (-1)
5. HTML (-1)
6. Web Content (+1)
7. Article Writing (-5)
8. Joomla! (+10)
9. CSS (-4)
10. WordPress (-2)

(Disclaimer: WordPress is produced by Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Partners.)

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