I had a few old dogs kicking around that I thought was high time to spiffy up. Page after page of hand coded html. Messy html at that.

What easier way to spruce things up than converting them to WordPress! Free, gorgeous templates are plentiful and upgrading a site to include RSS is a bonus. Word on the street is that the new Internet Explorer 7 will be RSS friendly.

Is there a way around copying and pasting each html page into a WordPress post? Not that I know of. Please note though: I have sad, sad technical skills so I could very well be missing something. However I found using the Visual Rich Editor in WordPress (option located at the bottom of the Users page in your admin panel) did help speed things up since I didn’t have to copy & paste all the links within the page content I was copying.

Other than transferring html pages to WP posts, what steps did I do?

.htaccess File

After pasting the permalinks setup into the .htaccess file, remember to do the following:

Canonical Fix

Examples:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.superaff\.com
rewriterule (.*) http://www.superaff.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Or if you prefer the non-www version:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^superaff\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://superaff.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Redirect each html file name to the new url

Example:

Redirect 301 /example.html http://superaff.com/new-url-example

Exclude any dirty bots you don’t want sniffing around, example:

<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 208.66.195.0/28
</Limit>

=end .htaccess tweaks=

Robots.txt File

• Make sure to have a robots.txt file in place.

404 Error Pages

• Customize a 404.php page for your site. Especially important since you’re moving around and renaming pages.

Database Backup

Implement a database backup system that works best for your needs:

• Free Auto MySQL Backup Script
• WordPress Database Backup Plugin
• CpanelSiteSaver Review

Spam Control

If you’re going to have a comments feature, make sure to setup spam control:

• Spam Karma Plugin
• Spam Karma FYI
• WP Spam Tools

Sitemap

• Install the Google Sitemap Generator

Title Tags

• Optimize your title tags

Copyright Notice

• Don’t forget to add your copyright information. You can dynamically update the year displayed by using php or javascript.

Site Authority Pages

If you don’t already have them, create an About page, Contact page, Privacy Policy. You can slim down the page template easily if you’d like.

FavIcon

Complete your new design with an updated favicon.

• FavIcon Creator
• How to add a favicon to WordPress

WordPress As CMS

If you want to use WordPress as a Content Management System for your old html sites:

• Try the Static Front Page plugin for a –wait for it– static home page.
• Want to drop the comment ability? Simply remove all comment links and forms from the WP theme you will be using.
• Mass Edit Pages
• WP Sane Menu
• Read: WordPress Hacking
• BaoCMS Plugin

BaoCMS provides basic CMS (Content Management System) features for WordPress. You can define and manage flexible set of blocks (panels) in your templates. Each block/panel can hold unlimited number of modules (something like bricks).

Some work to do, that’s for sure. If you have large amounts of html page, you may be better off outsourcing the html page/wp post transfer. Though I did find it worthwhile doing this myself manually as I was able to tweak content while I worked.

My old dogs sure cleaned up nice with the WP conversion. Amazing how fresh digs can sure kick the site up a notch or two!