Static Site to WordPress Conversion
One of my clients, for whom I designed and built a static HTML website back in 2008, is starting to need updates to it more frequently, as her career as a theatre set and costume designer progresses.
Following my recent emphasis on WordPress-based projects, I decided that a recent set of updates she requested was the perfect catalyst to migrate the site to WordPress, so that future updates and structure changes could be handled more efficiently.
In all the migration took just over a day, with over half that time spent organising the photo galleries properly. I also took the opportunity to widen the layout a little and reorganise the navigation menu – so easy with WordPress.
So when you visit www.katematthews.co.uk you are now visiting a WordPress site, with the final result achieved by means of 7 plugins (most of them for SEO) and 3 widgets.
Good to see you recognized that WordPress is a better content management system (CMS) for her business and most any other business today. Between making it simple to frequently update content and the plugins that make WordPress search engine friendly there are probably no sites that should still be static sites.
I wrote a post about building a successful blog-based business that you and your readers may find useful. It includes many additional plugins and specific tips on usability and what is important to include on any business site. I also provide proven methods for generating incoming links and driving traffic – most of them at no cost.
I hope you’ll visit and I will share this post and also find you on your favorite Social Networking sites so we can keep in touch and collaborate.
WordPress is good, though there are other good, simple CMSes as well. Have you tried CMS Made Simple or ModX?
Good work. I often use WordPress for basic client sites as it’s very quick to setup and does provide a nice ‘out of the box’ feature set. 7 plugins for SEO seems a lot though, can you list them somewhere? I never know which to install and which are the best.
Well, I said “most” – and I also should have said “SEO and security”. I’m not going to reveal the security plugins for obvious reasons, but for SEO I use All In One SEO Pack, Google Analyticator, and Google XML Sitemaps.