1996-era content-rich website transfer to Wordpress?

I bought a website that contains about 3,000 pages of content a few years ago.

The site was built according to 1996 standards and I've been told it could be generating a LOT more traffic and revenue if it were updated to current search engine standards.

My question: What would be the best way to transfer this massive amount of content to a new search engine-optimized platform?

I've heard a lot about Wordpress as a search engine friendly platform.

Is it possible to move the content over to Wordpress and have Wordpress still "look like" and operate like a traditional website, with categories and main menu links that go to sub-menus?

I guess I need some quality guidance on this task!

If you could point me to some articles, a website or an individual with the answer, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Dave

 

I would definitely move it to Wordpress. I don't create traditional websites at all anymore, because once you are beyond the Wordpress learning curve, life is so easy, you will never go back to traditional design.

Once you are used to the interface and have the hang of editing templates, you can upload, edit and change your website from anywhere. Everything is there for you, and there is a plugin for everything. I've just finished creating a complete ecommerce website and was amazed to find plugins for everything I needed, from the contact form to the shopping cart. I will never go back.

My favourite template is this one for creating blogs that look like normal websites with all the wonderful functions of Wordpress:

themehybrid.com/demo/options/

Best of luck.

 

the most difficult part will be keeping the urls unchanged. You may need to rewrite the urls in order to keep them unchanged. Depending on your original url structure, this can be a difficult work.

I think you need to consider this first.

 

I don't think that moving to WordPress is a good idea. WordPress is made exclusively for blogging. If you need a quality CMS and I would recommend you MODx or Drupal CMS. I think that there are some scripts that cha be used to transfer content, but I don;t know nothing about your website. But you'd better find something or to pay someone to migrate the old website because it will be a pain to move it article by article.

You can also try to revamp the site and to make it compliant to todays W3 standards.

 

3000 pages is a lot for WP.

 

I dabbled with a large wordpress site once, and it crapped out after several hundred pages (note there is a difference in wp between posts and pages). TO let wordpress handle it, you may need someone with a lot of wp experience. It can be done, because I did hear of one company using wp as a CMS, but it may need some mods.

 

Well he's almost certainly not going to be able to keep the url structures the same, he would need to 301 the old ones to the new.

Thats not strictly true. Many static sites are on wordpress purely because its easy to edit or change the look of the site later. You can use pages rather than posts, and nothing is dated - it'll just look like a normal site if you use the proper theme.

 

You could block access to your site via robots while to experimented with the switch over to see if its possible. I'd say it depends on your url structure if its worth the effort.