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Currently, I get about 125,000+ visits a month. The increase in number of site visitors has been slow but very steady.
It will cost me several thousand dollars to hire someone to redo the site in the Blog format. I don't mind spending the money. But the real cost will be the huge amount of personal time transferring text and images, which I estimate to be 1000 - 1500 hours.
After managing my site with FrontPage, I had it redone just over two years ago. So, believe me, I know the time and tedium involved. And I now have double the amount of graphics and content, though WordPress seems to be more intuitive and, as a result, should be easier to use than Coranto.
I want to make the change to, hopefully, increase income.
I'm retired so have about five more years I want to devote to running the site. Then I'd pass it on to a family member (who currently does not know how to run a site, one of the other reasons I'm thinking of putting it into WordPress).
Any thoughts if the time and effort is worth it?
Thank you!
A couple of thoughts, though
- do a google search for Coranto to Wordpress conversion or Coranto to [somecms] conversion. I found a number of pages and possibly there will be some time-saving ideas there.
- you should be able to come up with some scripting/regular expression goodness that would turn these Coranto pages into SQL inserts that you would then have to check and clean up in Wordpress, but it shouldn't take a huge amount of time.
When you say "hiring someone for thousands of dollars" is that just for design work? Design can be expensive, of course (or cheap, without a direct relationship to quality). If it's for development, though, that seems like a lot to get Wordpress up and running for you without actually transferring the data. I don't know how complex your project is, but if I were hiring someone for thousands of dollars to redo it in a blog format and the data was at all regular (major proviso - if it has no obvious pattern, there's nothing you can do), I would expect that to include design and having the developer put together a script that would parse the data and do most of the grunt work of putting it in the WP database.
I could be way off base - your project may be way way more complex than I know, but in that case, I might consider a full-blown CMS rather than a blogging platform.
... rereading that vague ramble, I'm not sure that was helpful at all, but you did ask for "any thoughts" :-)
You hit the nail on the head when you wrote "it seems like I would need a really compelling reason (i.e. current site absolutely unusable) to put in 1500 hours into data transfer."
That's what I'm honestly trying to determine.
The site is usable to site visitors, but a nightmare to work on in the background. I'd like to pass it on to my daughter some day but her skills are limited to Word Processing.
My skills are not much more, though I know some basic HTML.
My site is very complex in the background, controlled by CSS and a lot of custom functionality that no one but the highly skilled person who developed my site wants to touch. I just don't like being dependent on one person no matter how much I think of their work or the amount of confidence I have in them (which is a lot).
As to your time-saving suggestions, I know that my web developer would set me up in that manner.
I'm making an nice supplemental retirement income that I would like to transfer to my daughter when I'm no longer willing or able to work on the site. I'd never be able to train her in Coranto with it's quirks and quirky editor. WordPress seems easy and there is broad based help and support if needed.
I was hoping that the blogging platform would increase visitor loyalty and help increase both traffic and income.
In summary, I'd switch for two reasons:
- to have a site that is easy for a non-skilled person to manage
- to increase income
Is the later a reasonable expectation?
I'm curious. What CMS would you recommend? Are there any as easy in the back end as WordPress?
If the existing pages will not be updated any further (just add new stuff) then if I was you I'd look at doing something like that. There's a handy utility (wget) that will let you basically download a copy of the entire site into static HTML format.
Is there a reason you want a CMS? Personally I prefer to use Dreamweaver to edit the files locally and then upload them. No database, no security issues, no fuss. Simply edit then publish, and there's always a backup of the files on my local hard drive. Using Dreamweaver isn't that much different from using a word processor if you're using it simply to publish pages!
When I had the change made to Coronto about two years ago, it was for the following reasons:
- to improve navigation - managing the site with FrontPage became difficult. The site keep growing and navigation was poor.
- to make site work easier (at least that what was told and expected) - more and more custom functionality was added to the site, so the back end of Coranto is complex. If you make the slightest mistake, something can get screwed up, or a page overwritten, or a duplicate page that you can only remove by ftp; awkward and non-intuitive inserting and placing images (I have thousands of images in my site). I've contacted about 8 highly skilled web developers to see if they could work on my site. None will touch the back end.
- easy to use - The original goal was to be able to transfer the site to my daughter who has no web design skills; to have a back end interface that is easy and intuitive to use....no more difficult than a word processor. Coranto (which uses Tiny MCE) is, as mentioned, a nightmare in this regard.
I've played with WordPress and adding content and images are very easy.
Also, besides graphics, I have thousand of internal links in my site. I've been told most are unnecessary in a blog format; the keywords are used instead.
>> Using Dreamweaver isn't that much different from using a word processor
I know. But it's a long time since I've used a page authoring program. I'm wondering if I'd be able to include all the functionality.
Any additional thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you so very much.
