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The site is an information site with about 4,000+ articles, about 80% of which is original. Blog run on Blogger (classic template because it is FTPed to the site) has about 800+ posts.
The site ranks in the top 5 for its main keyword, and has a lot of #1 rankings for other keywords. The news section of the site is indexed in Google News. So I want to make sure that I am doing this right and not lose any of our rankings.
I have very little programming knowledge (hence, Frontpage). But I want to move the site to the 21st century both in terms of looks and ease of managing the site (e.g to change the right sidebar, I have to go through each and every page, which is painful and time consuming).
I've been thinking of the factors I should consider in terms of moving the site to a Wordpress CMS. Here are some of the factors I have thought of:
1 - How to retain the URLs, or at least properly redirect the URLs of almost 5,000 pages of content to the Wordpress naming convention?
2 - Ease of the move. Should I experiment on a smaller site first, before tackling on the bigger project? Or are there people I can tap to outsource the move seamlessly?
3 - What do I need to watch out for when moving to Wordpress?
4 - Is Wordpress the best (low cost) CMS that we could use?
What other factors should I think of? Should I even do this?
Thanks for your help
I don't know as WP can do a URL that includes a parent and a child category. Drupal would have no problem with that, but that's another story.
2. I would not say you should experiment with a smaller site per se, you should experiment with a *copy* of your site.
FTP everything to your local machine. Set it up as a local server using XAMPP or WAMP or some such thing and get WP up and running locally. I usually do this by sandboxing everything to a .loc domain that I create for the sandbox. If you have absolute URLs on your pages, though, you'll need to set up your server so that your domain resolves to your local machine for testing. This is pretty easy, but it involves setting up a virtual host and editing your windows hosts file (er... I don't know what it involves if you're on a Mac).
Okay, that all may sound complex, but it's not really too bad. When you get to that stage come back and ask for details.
3. Not sure. It would depend a bit on your site. Duplicate content issues used to be the big worry, but WP is much better now.
4. Not necessarily. Again, it depends on your site. Dries (founder of drupal) likes to mention
Okham's Razor for CMS: When choosing among CMS, you should chose the simplest CMS that will get the job done, but no simpler.
What that means is that he straight up says that Wordpress is better than Drupal for simple sites. Joomla may even be better for medium complex sites. For sites that will have lots of custom functionality, Drupal wins. There are of course hundreds more CMS that could be slid into that schema.
If what your site has is basically words, pictures, video and audio on categorized pages with commenting on posts, but not much interaction among users or complex user profiles or anything like that, it's likely that Wordpress will get the job done.
If you don't even want user comments on your pages and your main issue is simply updating your sidebar, though, you could just use a simple server-side include, PHP script or whatever, and be done with it without even something like Wordpress. All you would do is edit one file, FTP it over and every page would update instantly and it would take hardly any server resources at all.
We think that WP will be better because the site is basically articles arranged by categories and sub-categories, with very few pictures and ads. We don't have user profiles at all.
We also want to redesign the site. It's just that the cost of buying premium WP template, and adding the plugins is so much lower compared to hiring someone to redesign the site.
However, we plan to introduce two searchable databases where users can search by variable1, variable2 and so on. I'm not sure if that is something that can be handled by WP, and what plugin to use.
You can get some of that functionality with Drupal using Views, but it's more of a filter system than a search system. I suspect you would need to code something custom that would integrate with Wordpress and, just guessing from what you say, would be in two separate databases (so you'd have three total for your site).
I'll just be learning how to do this, so I'll be here frequently with questions -- starting with how to set up the local server you mentioned :o)
Thanks so much
Moving a static site to a CMS is not an easy undertaking, and a database-driven site is more resource-intensive. You need to carefully consider several factors and evaluate any gains against the disadvantages.
Firstly, it is imperative that you do all you can to preserve the same file names for existing content, as even carefully-coded mass 301 redirects won't stop potentially lowered rankings for an indeterminate period. If your site attracts regular visitors, any design changes should be evolutionary and not radical.
What advantages are you looking for in converting to a CMS other than simplifying template updates? Are you looking for more advanced actual content management or just site management? What's your plan for CMS updates/upgrades (WordPress like many other CMSs has regular security updates as well as newer versions requiring eventual upgrades)? What are your aims for content authoring? Are you part of an editorial team with several people interacting and updating the site content? Do you need graduated access permissions?
Finally, be careful you're not reinventing the wheel with the added search databases. In the spirit of ergophobe's reminder of seeking simplicity, I have often found that a Google Custom Search box gives superior results to a built-in CMS solution when dealing with keyword searches of mostly static content. Is your search problem simply keyword-based or more complex?
The site is an information site, and we add about 3-5 original articles per week. We also have a News section where we manually accept press release submissions from other companies in our sector (anywhere from 5-10 per day). This News section is indexed by Google News as press releases.
We also have a blog (Blogger FTPed to the domain), and this uses the classic templates.
Right now, we have about 4,500+ pages and all are static (edited by Frontpage). The blog has an additional 850+ pages
The site is running on a dedicated server right now because we have an ad server that's actively running and is too slow with a shared server.
Do you want to have comments and/or RSS enabled for the content that is currently static?
Yes.
What advantages are you looking for in converting to a CMS other than simplifying template updates?
1 - We want to keep the look of the site uniform (e.g. main site to look alike with the blog -- right now, they look so different)
2 - We want to update the look of the site. The site looks and feels like 10 year old
3 - We want to make the addition of content easier.
4 - We want to improve the navigation of the site.
5 - We want to make sure all our articles are linked properly in their rightful sections. One mistake we made through the years is that we have original articles that are live, but are not linked anywhere from our site. Hence, these pages have no traffic and no pagerank.
6 - We want an RSS feed of our articles.
We will definitely make sure to upgrade the site when updates and upgrades are released
What are your aims for content authoring? Are you part of an editorial team with several people interacting and updating the site content? Do you need graduated access permissions?
Right now we have 2 people working on the site, but we have an offsite person currently doing the research for us, but we need to help in putting in content and we need that person to access the site and put in content. If we're able to do this, we can add more people to put in the content later
Is your search problem simply keyword-based or more complex?
We're currently using Google for the search.
The two new features we want to introduce are searchable databases of information -- e.g. widgets by location, by price, by type, etc. We have them right now arranged in static HTMLs and we want to add the interactivity. One way we can do this is to put these two databases outside of the CMS but make them look like the site, and simply link them from the site
And YES -- we are very concerned with the loss of traffic this will cause especially since our income is from advertising sales (Adsense and we sell our own ads)
widgets by location, by price, by type, etc. We have them right now arranged in static HTMLs and we want to add the interactivity. One way we can do this is to put these two databases outside of the CMS but make them look like the site, and simply link them from the site
But you don't want these in a shopping cart? I wonder if you wouldn't want something like xcart or whatever. Alternatively, Drupal using Views would allow a variety of ways for users to view data (tables, detail pages, lists), and filter (by location, by price, by multiple variables).
So I wonder if you wouldn't look for either a shopping cart that integrates with WP or putting the whole thing on drupal
if your old links are poorly designed, you'll need a redirection plugin in wordpress which keeps your old links and redirect your readers to a new page:
[wordpress.org...]
more choices:
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And in my opinion, all CMS you mentioned needs basic skills (PHP, CCS, HTML) if you need a customized design. I know only little about all these stuff, so i finally go for Wordpress because its code is very neat and clean, at least I know what i am doing in Wordpress, but not so good at understanding Drupal and joomla. The later two choices are too powerful and sophisticated.
One way we can do this is to put these two databases outside of the CMS but make them look like the site, and simply link them from the site
This is a fine idea and offers many advantages for links.
As dulldull noted, no matter what tool you use you will likely want to customize it some and that will require someone with coding experience. I also think it's important to find someone with experience in the CMS you choose to go with. Their experience could save you a ton of headaches with upgrades and avoiding future issues.
