converting to wordpress

Diceicle

Hi there,

I have a website that is a couple of years old, based in html and is doing fairly well in Google. Updates are becoming more regular and will be be a regular thing in the future, I would like to hand the site over to my partner ( who knows nothing of HTML) so what I was thinking of doing was to convert everything over to Wordpress ( or similar) and use that as a CMS for easy creation of additional pages and updating of news etc.

What will I have to factor in in this plan?

Are there many pitfalls?
Will the existing Jquery used in my site be a hinderance?
Changing HTML to PHP will I lose my Google-juice that those pages generate?

Thats all the question I can think of for now.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this situation.

daymobrew

While I am a big fan of WordPress, I have found it easier to convert an existing static site to CMS Made Simple.

When creating a CMSMS template, it's basically a matter of replacing your content with a {content} tag and similar for your menu and stylesheet. Then you create the required pages within the CMSMS admin area.

URLs can be given .html extensions to retain Google links (or you could create 301 redirects to the new pages).

On the other hand, I think that WordPress backend is easier to use and it has a massive number of plugins available. I have based a few sites on a Blueprint CSS theme for WordPress (though I have updated it for newer versions of Blueprint CSS).

Can you post a link to your site so people can see it and advise on potential pitfalls when you choose one CMS over another.

Diceicle

Hi
Thanks for the suggestion of CMSMS. It looks like it could be the answer. One other quick question, is there blog integration? The existing static site has an external blog but it would be preferable to have one on-site.

Thanks for your help.

daymobrew

Diceicle wrote: »

Thanks for the suggestion of CMSMS. It looks like it could be the answer. One other quick question, is there blog integration? The existing static site has an external blog but it would be preferable to have one on-site.

It has a News module that can work as a blog - that is how I present news on my residents association site.

There is a CGBlog module too for CMS made simpls, which is based on the news module. I've used it on a few sites and while it's not Wordpress, it's pretty good. Would agree with daymobrew that it is very straightforward to convert an existing design to a CMSMS template.

If you do want to go the wordpress route, a framework like Thematic will take much of the donkey work out of it. You just create a child theme, and thematic takes care of most of the rest.

nellyshark

Again Im going to throw Modx into the equation Has good blogging facilities too

Trojan

If your existing site has a simple layout it will be very easy to port it to WordPress. Doing the basic conversion should take 40-60 minutes. After that it's a question of porting the content (time depends on how much) and dynamic content (i.e. setting up equivalent plugins) - and you probably won't have much of the latter due to html site.

If you're looking for help, feel free to DM me or email me (address on sites below).

cormee

Diceicle wrote: »

Hi there,

I have a website that is a couple of years old, based in html and is doing fairly well in Google. Updates are becoming more regular and will be be a regular thing in the future, I would like to hand the site over to my partner ( who knows nothing of HTML) so what I was thinking of doing was to convert everything over to Wordpress ( or similar) and use that as a CMS for easy creation of additional pages and updating of news etc.

What will I have to factor in in this plan?

Are there many pitfalls?
Will the existing Jquery used in my site be a hinderance?
Changing HTML to PHP will I lose my Google-juice that those pages generate?

Thats all the question I can think of for now.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this situation.

I'm working on a project that's something like that. The way I've done it so far is

- Move the old site into a subdirectory on the server (say www.yourdomain.com/oldsite)
- Set up Redirect 301's from all the old pages on the site to their new location in /oldsite/
- Install WordPress in the root directory and work on it from there
- Once the project is finished I'll set up redirects from the newer subdirectory urls to the new WordPress urls

Setting up your redirects correctly is the most important thing (if your main concern is loss of SEO status), get that right and you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

If you do follow the process above you'll run into an issue where WordPress redirects www.yourdomain.com/index.php to www.yourdomain.com/oldsite/index.php which would mean you wouldn't be able to view the homepage of the new WordPress installation you're working on - the following fixes that issue: http://ilikewordpress.com/274/loading-wordpress-from-index-php/

Diceicle

Thanks for all the advice. At the moment I'm trying to get my head around the CMSMS interface and figure out how exactly to implement what I want.

The plan for the time being is to have pages such as press, testimonials and implement an onsite blog and have them as controlable through CMSMS. If this works the way I think it will work think it will work all should be well. I'm guessing that I can just have sections of a page alterable through CMSMS right? It works sort of like an iFrame??

My next site to develop may fully use Wordpress.

Actually, one more quick question, the site I'm working on, it has around 25-30 pages, is it possible to have a dynamic navigation menu within a static site or am I talking nonsence here?

Trojan

Diceicle wrote: »

Actually, one more quick question, the site I'm working on, it has around 25-30 pages, is it possible to have a dynamic navigation menu within a static site or am I talking nonsence here?

If your question is "is it possible to have a dropdown menu within a static site?" then yes, no problem. Search for "css downdown menu", "javascript dropdown menu" and "dhtml dropdown menu" for some ideas. A List Apart have some great articles on it, most of the ones I just found are ~2004 era so look for something a bit more up to date.

HTH.

daymobrew

Diceicle wrote: »

Actually, one more quick question, the site I'm working on, it has around 25-30 pages, is it possible to have a dynamic navigation menu within a static site or am I talking nonsence here?

Yes, it is of course possible.
You use the Menu Manager (under Layout/Menu Manager). This creates the html for all your live pages. I always have trouble with this part because I haven't read enough docs on the code involved. Click "Module Help" when in Menu Manager for technical docs.

BTW, there is a decent overview of creating a template for CMSMS in their docs.

You could download a template to review and copy.