website renovation advice sought

My weedguru site is now 10 years old and beginning to show a few shabby edges and creases and rips and tears in the tapestry upon which it lives and breathes.

The front end is divided into my own horrid attempts at html...
(www.weedguru.com)
with links to a few affiliates/link exchanges I have long forgotten about, and also a one way street to the 'weedguru Classic' pages ( http://www.weedguru.com/bong.php which make the more modern front end seem wonderful, purely because the old style is somehow even worse, an odd mixture of ghostbusters/the goonies/ abstract shapes...nonetheless there is some solid content there which continues to pull in a large amount of traffic. What I do with that traffic is...minimal. Aside from sighing in disbelief at the less than herculean but still large traffic which the site pulls in monthly. (DEC 2012 traffic- 50-60000 unique visitors, 1.8 million hits)

The forums ( www.weedguru.com/forum/index.php ) have remained solid for many years. I could do with a major dose of SEO in my veins, and plan on taking such a dietary path, starting with consuming the various guides I have already found on the ultra rich content on this site. I am also toying with the idea, if not seriously considering, moving from phpbb3 to mybb or some other forum structure. (forums- Total posts 388317 • Total topics 24160)

The front end of the site needs work, a complete overhaul in all honesty, which is why I am spending time peeking at 'most beautiful free templates' on google, for not just phpbb3, mybb, but also html. Perhaps I need to stump up some gold nuggets and pay someone to do the creating? For my own graphic design skills are plain for all to see as wretched on my homepage. Perhaps a partnership of sorts is a better way forward, if my aims are to-
improve the site in many ways, mainly visually and SEO wise
make some money from the site
mix the site aspirations with my wordsmithery aspirations

For now, I hope I have penned enough virtual ink to make this seem, at worst , somewhat demented but sincere. And also, that I receive some advice/suggestions/reactions to my decadent squealing for help, in my mission to finally make something special, of a site which has long held great potential, but has been stunted in growth, mainly due to my off screen passions taking centre and sole stage...like a race horse kept always and only in the stables, fed well enough to maintain its existence, but never allowed to stretch its limbs as it yearns, run wild free and beastly...

Cheers,
D

 

Dude you are one creative writer but looking at your site I agree that you should probably outsource some help with this project. If your site is generating a lot of traffic then it has the potential to make a fair amount of money if done right. If you want to do it yourself I would be happy to answer any "short" questions. My contact details are on my website tommyarnold.co.uk

 

Cheers for reading through, peeking at the site and responding, Tommy. I will surely be making use of your generous offer of some assistance. Presently, I am pondering porting the front end over to a Wordpress CMS, either installing a fresh clean phpbb cose or moving the forums over to myBB structure. My major concern with the former is...if I move my front end content to a wordpress CMS will I definitely losee my well established URLs and the SEO attached to them? Must I change URLs and use 301 redirects?

 

Keep in mind, changing your design can be dangerous, why don't you ask your forum community for advice on the site? They are the ones using it in the end. Also, who is to say you NEED a CMS.

If you are bent on one then consider leaving your old site up while installing Wordpress. Yes it can get messy but you can keep your old URLs. After a few months you can delete the old site, repost all your old posts and you should be set. Again i warn against changing a working site

"if it isn't broken, don't fix it"

 

I am a worse designer than you and have nothing to offer or sell regarding SEO. The only advice I would offer is that you surely are under monetizing your site and there is money to be made with a site like yours. I used to have some vaporizer related sites and there is some pretty good money to be paid for promoting those items as an affiliate. People are already looking for that stuff and I saw no ads of any kind on your website. Just a few could probably make you some decent money and really compliment your content and wouldn't be too whoreish.

 

Thankyou, abusschaert. the major requests from the community are for a wider selection of MODs and a smoother looking forum, not change on a mass scale. As for the front end, the community has little opinion, for they bypass it and head always direct to the forums. And thats part of my point, really...If the site gets a fair amount of traffic with the front end looking so wretched, surely if I spruce it up, or redesign completely for the better, the traffic will only increase...

I am not certain that I need a CMS. it was suggested to me a couple of days back and seems like a good idea, kinda like a webdesign program with many easy modifcations available and aesthetically malleable.
The other paths for redesign?
1. pay someone to design a front end template
2. use a free template found online
3. improve the current one drastically, start from scratch even
My web design skills are awful. I just perhaps too quickly concluded that the CMS option was best for now.

if I did incorporate the wordpress or similar CMS how do the urls look??? mysite.com/wp/XXXXX
or can I change them to appear how I please?? mysite.com/news et ctee ctec??

 

You can change the URLs to look like whatever you like. You have this option when creating a post

 

If you would prefer to do this yourself and you have the time, I would recommend finding a decent wp template and building a separate site possibly on a subfolder ie yoursite.com/newsite. Once you have installed the template start to copy every page of content over to wp one by one, but while doing this keep a list of the old url and new url. This can be converted to a 301 redirect later.

An example of a list (with seo optimized urls), and dont worry about the "/newsite" this can easily be removed later.
oldurl : newurl,
http://www.weedguru.com/bongtheory.php : http://weedguru.com/newsite/bongs,
http://www.weedguru.com/bong.php : http://weedguru.com/newsite/bongs/how-to-make-a-bong,

With the list make sure you separate the old and new urls with a ":" and each line with a "," this makes it easier for one of us to convert it to a htaccess redirect for you later.

Once you have copied over the content, the next step would be to work on the forum, I dont have much experience with phpbb but a quick search shows there are plenty of "mods" available so you may not need to change to mybb, I would just find a nice template, similar to your new wp template then install the phpbb seo mod and see how that works.

Just an idea.

 

its not only about website. Its also about creative thinking with all the features. There are many company outside who can help you with this. And designing is there best part for the best i will recommend you some sites i think you must have a look at them. cheap web design, I think website should have clear end with user interaction facility which will give your users more readability and more time to your website.
try foduu its one of the best web design company with lots of offer for you. You can get a good and creative idea from them.

 

That is exactly what I began to do last night, Tommy. Installed the latest WP, and got to the choosing theme/customization phase then gave up for the night and rolled into bed to enjoy a few pages of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan before slumber. Its a punchy, fun read...

I will get back onto the Themes this evening and begin copying over the information from the front end to the duplicates in a new pretty theme. I am not yet aware of how easy the Wp themes are to manipulate, in terms of adding in code and pictures...but assume from what I have read here and elsewhere that its fairly simple and effortless.

The forums...for now, I have decided to grab the latest phpbb code and perform a complete fresh install, just to allow me to start this new development phase with a clean slate. My only caution there is regarding, again the potential changes of URLs...will installing a new PHPBB3 forum code automatically affect the many thousands of pages from my present forums which are already indexed???? I assume not...but am unsure.

Cheers, again. For your assistance, Tommy. Wishing you fun in the snow...

Also...what kind of prices would I be looking at to have someone design a front end template? I have an idea in my mind. A menu page mainly, with some areas which light up if the cursor moves over them, all very marijuana orientated. I'd just need the one page, then use as a template for the rest of the site. How is such business carried out? A customer draws a picture, asks if it can be done, is given a price, then accepts whatever the designer produces?