Changing a "regular" website to a Wordpress site and help with page permalinks

CMS & WordPress
1

I’ve been using thematic to redo a website. I basically recreated the look of the current website as a child theme in thematic. There is a blog currently that goes along with the website but the owner of the website and I decided to make the entire website in Wordpress.

I’ve more or less finished the pages and need to import the current content into my test site.

The blog is currently in a subdirectory. If the website is going to be in Wordpress then I assume it should be in the top level directory. I’d like to maintain the urls eg. I want my www.domain.com/about.php to have the same url when it is in Wordpress.

I believe what I will need to is a 301 redirect for blog page since it will be moved to the top level.

I’m stuck on the other pages. I feel like a “dummy” but I don’t understand what I’ve been reading about permalinks and pages including the Wordpress codex instructions. I can’t figure out how change for example:
www.domain.com/?page_id=515 to www.domain.com/about.php.

If anyone can shed some light on this I’d appreciate it. Has anyone found a good website that shows best practices for moving a website from “regular” to Wordpress?

Thanks.

2

First of all you install WordPress Permalink Redirect plugin so that all old URLs will be redirected to the new ones then you have two choices,

1st - /%category%/%postname%/

2nd - /%postname%/

go to the dashboard of your wordpress under setting you will permalinks,

paste either of the 2 in the custom field and hit update. I always prefer the 1st one because it also include the category in the URL and I put a keyword in the category filed so one more keyword in the URL.

3

Install deans permalink plugin which offer you to change permalink without braking any link on your blog.

4

Thanks. I think I’m finally getting this. I was able to rename the pages to match the old URL. I will install the plugins to redirect the current blog when we go live. Once I become more comfortable working in Wordpress I think I’ll enjoy designing websites with it. I’m going to redesign my own next in thematic to get more practice at it.