Convert website to wordpress

[leehughes]

Hi,

Someone told me about converting my website to wordpress. Just for the ease of it and the fact that I will be updating it from the road so the easier the better.

How hard is it to convert an existing website into wordpress?

www.leehughes.co.uk

My concerns are the 3D route page and the dropdown menu and jquery lightbox for videos.

thanks
p.s how much would someone charge to do this? I have someone who is willing to convert it but I have no idea of a price to charge

[Dan Grossman]

There are a number of themes and plugins that support dropdown navigation like that out of the box, either using category hierarchy or page hierarchy as the basis.

You could look at the code behind some of the free themes from WooThemes.com and see how they do the menu:
http://www.woothemes.com/2009/07/mainstream/

WordPress is bundled with jQuery already, so continuing to use that shouldn't pose any problems.

You can put whatever HTML you have in the body of your pages now in the body of a WordPress post or page, so reproducing the 3D route page should also pose no problem.

I've migrated existing sites to WordPress before and it wasn't that much trouble. Chop up the design to fit into header, footer, body and sidebar pieces and start reproducing files as WordPress pages. You can even include PHP code in the body of a post with a plugin like Exec-PHP.

[John LA]

Converting it to wordpress can take time but it will be easy for you to update the site in the future once you've installed it.

Wordpress is very SEO-friendly. You can rank in Google in hours after you post (if done correctly).

So I say, give it a go.

[mknight1234]

wordpress is a platorform for blog , am i right?
then convert a website to WP ?
what do u mean??

[Dan Grossman]

wordpress is a platorform for blog , am i right?
then convert a website to WP ?
what do u mean??

It's primarily used for blogging, but it's good as any other basic CMS under the hood.

[mknight1234]

wow, oaky , got that
thanx DAN
i need to know more abt WP anyway

[Dave011]

I think its not that easy!maybe if you develop a new website made up of wordpress.But and existing website to wordpress I really don't think its possible.

[Dan Grossman]

But and existing website to wordpress I really don't think its possible.

How can you say that after I said I've already done it?

[Shyflower]

I recently converted my website to WordPress. It was incredibly easy. The most time it took was writing new content for WP pages and transferring some of my old static content to WP pages.

In my situation, I had a blog attached to my static website and moved the blog to my root directory. I read through this file in the WP Codex before I began the switch.

The most difficult thing was to get a link to my blog from the home page. I had to do a lot of searching for "how", but finally found the following information:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/242865 .

First, I made a template blog.php inserting this code (I don't remember where I found it or I'd pass that on):

/*
Template Name: Blog
*/



// Which page of the blog are we on?
<?php$paged = get_query_var('paged');
query_posts('cat=-0&paged='.$paged);

// make posts print only the first part with a link to rest of the post.
global $more;
$more = 0;

//load index to show blog
load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/index.php');
?>

Then I made a blank page (not a post) and named it blog and designated it to use the blog.php template. The result is that http://mysite.com/blog goes to the first page of my blog.

[leehughes]

Thanks guys..

The person I was in contact with to do this for me can't do it anymore so am doing it myself which should be fun

But it's all a learning experience eh!

I will let you know how am getting on

[leehughes]

not going well erlkkk

http://www.leehughes.co.uk/wordpress/

Code is acting different from dreamweaver site for some reason

[Dan Grossman]

jQuery is not loaded so all the JavaScript is broken.

Here are several methods to load jQuery in your theme:
http://themocracy.com/2009/04/using-...ith-wordpress/

[leehughes]

There is only google analytics using javascript on that page. I only use Jquery for photos and videos.

[Dan Grossman]

There is only google analytics using javascript on that page. I only use Jquery for photos and videos.

Regardless, you're calling it on every page, and it's breaking your JS. Your GA code is broken as well due to some weird line wrapping your editor might have done.

    <script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("&#37;3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' 
    
    type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-9391160-1");
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
    } catch(err) {}</script>
	
	
	<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
		$(document).ready(function(){
			$("a[rel^='prettyPhoto']").prettyPhoto({
				animationSpeed: 'normal', /* fast/slow/normal */
				padding: 40, /* padding for each side of the picture */
				opacity: 0.75, /* Value betwee 0 and 1 */
				showTitle: true, /* true/false */
				allowresize: true, /* true/false */
				counter_separator_label: '/', /* The separator for the gallery counter 1 "of" 2 */
				theme: 'dark_rounded', /* light_rounded / dark_rounded / light_square / dark_square */
				callback: function(){}
			});
		});
	</script>

	<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
		$(document).ready(function(){
			$(".gallery a[rel^='prettyPhoto']").prettyPhoto({theme: 'dark_rounded'});

			code.init();
		});
		</script>

[leehughes]

thanks for the info

well spotted

[leehughes]

Starting to get the hang of it.

Figured out how to fix my dropdown menu and have validated the page..

I have also got rid of GA and Jquery as I will install them via popular widgets later on.

I do have a problem though.. my right slidebar does not go all the way down to the bottom of the page.

www.leehughes.co.uk
as you can see my right sidebar will extend with this site..

But www.leehughes.co.uk/wordpress

This is not the case, what is interesting is that it is the same code..

Am puzzled