I'm SEO and primary content creator for a UK ecommerce site (to give you an idea of scale, the business has annual turnover about £35m).
Having SEOed aggressively for a decade, we were hit hard by Google Panda, and only slightly less hard by Penguin. Most of the Penguin issues have been fixed. The content based issues linked to Panda have meant a complete revision of site content and information architecture.
The main web developer and I really want to use Wordpress to manage the non-commerce site content. The way content was previously managed resulted in a disorganised server with too many layers and much duplication.
Our website is on a Rackspace Microsoft server. Database and scripting is all MS platforms.
Our IT manager is strongly resisting the idea of attempting to install Wordpress using the MS Webmatrix facility. He says that it is too risky on an established site and that it is intended for new-build sites. He also claims that we do not have adequate in-house PHP/MySQL/IIS combined skills to cope with teething problems and security issues.
I acknowledge the validity of his concern over possible damage to our existing set-up, and about security.
His solution is having the install on a subdomain on a separate server. I really want to keep this content under the main .co.uk. The idea is to manage diverse (but on site topic) content while maximising integration with our social networking efforts. The whole thing needs to be SEO friendly.
The IT manager will not countenance an installation on our main server without an in-house person who has the required PHP/MySQL/IIS admin skills. He says this set of expertise would be very expensive to recruit, merely to maintain a glorified blog.
Our site restructure will be very significantly limited by our inability to use this platform as we had intended. I've checked out Blogengine.net and it really isn't comparable.
Any bright ideas?
Sorry for the long and possibly rambling post. I'm kind of at my wits' end here.
