As you know I have dozens of sites and most are coded in raw HTML back in the day when I created them. Now that WordPress has come along it offers a compelling case to convert these sites over. Here are a few of them:

1) WordPress makes it easy to update content and add content as needed without the use of conventional layout packages such as Dreamweaver and NVU.

2)There are many widgets and plug-ins that make it easy to port your site over to wordpress from a fixed url site.

How to get started.

The first step in converting an old HTML site to WordPress is the get a listing of all of the files on the current site. So for example, if you have a site with five pages then list out like this:

1)/widgets-to-buy.html

2)page1.html

3)page3.html

4)page5.html

Next you want to open up each of these files and copy the content (not menu or navigational content).

Create a new page under the Dashboard menu of wordpress.

Name the page so that its permalink matches the old page. So for example number one might be widgets-to-buy.

Save that page and start again until all of the pages are complete. Add the new address of the redirected page beneath the page in the list so it will look like this.

/widgets-to-buy.html
http://www.yoursite/widgets-to-buy

After the pages are all added the next step is to add in 301 redirects so you can redirect traffic from the old pages to the new wordpress pages. I download the “simple 301” redirect plugin for wordpress.

What you do here is for each page add on the left part of the menu

/widgets-to-buy             http://www.yoursite.com/widgets-to-buy

Just repeat this for each page and soon your site will be ported over.

Navigational Elements

Now that all the pages have been imported, the next step is to add a navigational menu or sidebar. I recommend using a menu and this makes it easy to add drop down menus to your site so that people can get to the areas of your site.

This is done in the “Appearance” section of the site and under menus. I’ll talk about that a little later.