I need some help. I am not a web designer and need some help revitalizing the look of my website that has not changed in many years. The problem is that I do not want to redo the whole thing because there are a couple of hundred pages of content that I do not want to have to change.
Then I remembered that I created my site with tables using php includes, and that this might be a quick way to upgrade the look.
This is the current table layout for 99% of the pages
<---------Top Navigation----------->
<----body---> <-right navigation->
<--------------footer-------------->
The body is different in each of the web pages, but the top navigation, right navigation, and footer are the same and pulled in with php includes.
So here is my plan. I need to get a designer to do the following:
a) create a new top navigation, right navigation, and footer module.
b) Create a skin for the invision board that matches the new look.
The main source of income for the site is advertising so that would need to be integrated into the project.
My questions are as follows:
Can you direct me to a website where I can get bids on this project? I looked here, but people keep mentioning other sites.
2)Do you think that there is a better way to accomplish this without having to transfer the content, and lose the individual urls as several pages have links from other sites?
Yes, this is not the appropriate place to ask for service providers, but you can do that at the SitePoint Marketplace. You are welcome to ask technical, how-to questions, though.
If your page templates are mainly controlled by includes, it may well be possible to update the site by modifying these includes. It depends on what they contain, though.
I took a look at the sitepoint marketplace and seems a little skimpy. Does anybody have anything to say about elance? How about any other similar site?
elance… bargepole and 80 feet and a biohazard suit.
The type of site you have would lend itself to a Wordpress installation. 2 column style site where its just the main content that would change.
WP is very useful for non designers as there are thousands of skins, layouts and templates to choose from.
It might be the perfect opportunity to prune and remove parts that aren’t needed and refocus your efforts onto the core of the site. If you have hundreds of pages - what are they actually for?!
Also to retain some measure of traffic and SERP’s position, use htaccess to redirect traffic from the old site to the new one.
Although pruning the site would be great from a design point of view, it would be bad from the point of view of attracting visitors from both search engines and deep links from outside. Yes wordpress does look great and there are a lot of skins available, but I rather keep the current structure for now.
Maybe wordpress for new content as long as I can keep the old content looking the same way or reasonably similar to the new wordpress content… I wonder if that is possible.