Hello, I need some help with upgrading an insurance site. its a very large site, all comprised of static html pages. We want to migrate them to a php database driven environment, with a cms integrated so easy additions can be made. The website is pretty simple, but has a horrible layout. Everything from the url structure, to title tags needs to be changed, and I really do not want to do this page by page. any thoughts about the best way to do this migration, while making sure no dead links are created. The site is myceisonline.com. Has anyone done an upgrade like this? some thoughts on pitfalls, and best practices would be awesome.
Oh my. I hope a redesign of the page itself is in the budget, because it looks like something thought up and executed using FrontPage at least 10 years ago... But yes - the best way is probably designing a template file, and pulling content from the database when requested. That way, the only thing needing to be done is making the layout (using CSS), the main template file, and then pull everything from the database dynamically - titles, content etc. You could make this page using perhaps a few files: and index.php as the main template file, pulling in a header and footer, and dynamically populate the content. As for the design/url structure, SEO for content etc, all that is for the pure design portion - the main work here would probably be putting all of the content in a structured database, to make it easy to pull titles/content etc. It would probably be possible to make this site using an existing CMS, but it wouldn't be all that hard to design it to use an in-house system. Of course, taking precautions to avoid SQL injection etc. would be needed, but all in all not that hopeless a project. Just don't get me started on the page-design itself