WordPress…

It’s pretty clear that this site is based on WordPress. It’s pretty stock, acts like a blog, and hasn’t been modified too much at all. Why do I bring that up? I’m glad you asked. 🙂
I’m the webmaster of a private site I inherited about six months ago. When I got it the site was a mess, filled with Microsoft Frontpage kludge. I know some folks may like that program, or it’s replacement Expression Web, but I wasn’t a big fan, especially after looking at the code it put out.
The first thing I did was rewrite the whole site, no more than 50 pages, in pretty straightlaced XHTML Transitional 1.0 Transitional. I didn’t change the look and feel much, other than the specific font type stuff. Good enough.
Well, maybe not. The site was still hard to navigate, requiring one to go through a couple pages to arrive at some locations. Not good. I decided to treat myself to Dreamweaver to make things easier. And it did, all while keeping the markup very simple. I ended up using their Spry Ajax stuff to do the menus and a couple of accordions, but other than that, the only “tricky” thing I used was some server side includes for the menus and footers – that and a bit of fun with Google Maps.
Still it wasn’t all that much fun to update and I’m not a big WYSIWYG guy, so I mostly wrote my own in Dreamweaver, not relying at all on the visual editor.
It has always been our plan to migrate the site to a CMS and I figured with the new year, why not now? Indeed.
I’d looked at some of packages like Joomla and Drupal that are out there, but frankly, they seemed like overkill for this site. It’s pretty lightweight. And then it struck me, could WordPress do the job. Yep. It seems that in that few releases static pages have gotten pretty easy to work with and that meant I was good to go.
In flurry what amounted to mostly cutting and pasted from the original site to WordPress, I managed to port the whole thing over in one day and that included having to do a whole set of pages over. They had maps and for some reason they didn’t work when I moved from my server to my project’s server.
I did find out why, btw, and regret I didn’t look harder last night, but it was late. As it turns out I could have kept all the work. But, as with many things, in doing those pages over I got a better result than the first time around anyway. Which reminds me of writer I met who never kept first drafts, claimed they were never any good anyway. He’d write them out, toss ’em, and start again. He was a pretty decent writer, so it must have worked for him.
In any case, the new site is up and running smoothly on WordPress. I like it a lot better and am only writing the entry to keep myself from diving back in to tweak some more. 🙂
Aloha!