From Regular Website To WordPress Website – Article 2

If you are getting ready to move from a regular old fashion html site to a wordpress site and you are doing the work either yourself or working with a developer, here are critical issues below:

1. Planning out the pages and posts.
2. Keeping a division between web pages and articles. (Do you still know the difference).
3. Choosing/buying a wordpress theme or having one developed for you custom.
4. The process of moving over content.
5. The importance of wordpress plugins and how they will improve your life greatly.
6. Other details such as where your site points now and how to migrate.

Let’s start with the planning of the migration process. What I did at first to not lose any continuity is create a /blog directory beneath my main site and began creating the wordpress version there. I figured when I am finished I will either point the site to this directory or move the wordpress version up to the root directory (which is what I decided in the end).

While getting ready to make the move, I decided to take advantage of the wordpress posting method, which is one of the critical reasons why you want to be using wordpress. Unlike web pages which need to be crawled, wordpress posts ping out to search engines like blogspot and google and tell the search engine you have just created new content. So, I have been creating a series of articles, like this one, in advanced of the final site migration.

Choosing a Theme…

What you will find as you look around for a free theme, is most free themes out there are really for pure bloggers. The best themes I am convinced you have to pay for. However, I found a theme I could live with and have implemented this on this site currently. Once I find a theme that I like in the future, I will just swap em out.

Getting The Main Links Right

One of the things that took me a couple of these wordpress iterations to get right is getting the home page in the right spot on the headers. Typically you will find that the theme you are using has hard coded the word and like “home” pointing to “/” your root. This means that you have to actually go into the theme and comment out or removing the hard coded home link. No worries, there is an editor under Themes. Just edit the header.php file (typically what it is called) and find the tags and comment them out with a . If you find you can’t write the files, (that would be why the save button would be missing), you need to change file permissions. This is relatively easy as well, even from ftp. If you have ftp, login and right click on the permissions for all the files in your theme directory. Then set them to at least 775 or rwx fully. If that does not work, then set the theme to 777 and make the changes.

That’s it for now.

Dan

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