I have a 5,000 page web site about cooking, food and recipes. It has been built by me over a period of years (started in 2000). I use Dreamweaver to create my HTML pages but as a self taught web designer the site code will be less than clean and is probably not compliant with web standards.

 

In order to clean up the site and improve it I feel it is probably time to consider a complete revamp and to do it using either WordPress or Joomla. I know very little about either although I keep thinking WordPress is perhaps more of a blogger's tool. Am I wrong?

 

I would like to have a look at some big sample sites using both WordPress and Joomla so if anyone can let me have URLs that would be useful.

 

I would also like some input as to whether WordPress or Joomla might be the most suitable for me to use. 5,000 pages are going to take some time to convert so this may be a long time job.

 

I am completely ignorant about how either works. Dreamweaver is installed on my system and I upload files and folders to the server using Cute FTP. Are either WordPress or Joomla installed on my system and then I upload pages as I go or . . . what? Can you point me to a simple guide that answers the questions the ignorant might ask?

It just occurred to me that if I was to convert 5,000 pages to WordPress or Joomla I would lose all the URLs that Google lists so it would be like starting again. Is there any way around this?

Sorry my answer isn't technically answering your question, but I'd just like to vouch for Wordpress.

 

Although initially Wordpress was a blogging tool, it has now been developed into one of the most powerful CMS's out there. I have a little bit of experience with Joomla! And in that small amount of time I found Wordpress far easier to use.

 

For example, you could easily set up custom categories for all your recipes and then organise them into menus.

 

Feel free to PM me if you want to talk about it further

Yup, WordPress would be a good call for this. You'd need a custom post type for recipes, taxonomies to suit however they're currently arranged and you can 301 redirect all your old URLs to the new ones (there's a good plugin for that).

 

WordPress is a CMS application - it's installed in your hosting account and you enter content through the web interface. It completely separates style from content, so the templates are stored in a folder in WordPress and pull the content in from the WordPress database.

 

Feel free to PM me if you want to talk about it further

 

Please only PM another member if you're looking to hire them, we prefer that all questions be answered in public on the forum so other people can benefit from the answers.

301 redirects are a big concern for me as with 5,000 pages that is a lot of redirects. I am having trouble getting my head around this. By way of example say this is the existing URL for a recipe on the HTML site:

 

http://www.sitename....1/recip0001.htm

 

Doesn't that URL have to remain on the server but with the code for the 301 redirect replacing the previous content? Is this what the WordPresss redirect plug-in will sort? I don't see how.

 

Sorry to sound a bit thick but I am completely new to WordPress or any CMS system.

 

Further to the above can you build the WordPress site on your own PC so that you can create it all before uploading to the server or does it have to be done online direct to the server. If the latter how do you work on it and stop the search engine seeing those pages until you are ready. (This job could take quite a time with so many pages.)

Edited September 14, 201214 yr by Dimeye

It's always advisable to set up a local web stack, and I've written a guide to setting up localhost for web development (Step 2) - that'll work if you're on Windows, for Mac or Linux you'll have to amend accordingly (I believe the package of choice on the Mac is MAMP).

 

If that seems like too much work you could just set up a subdomain off your main site, dev.whateveryourdomainis.com and work on it there - WordPress has an option to not publicise to search engines.

 

Edit: The WP plugin will intercept any requests for the old URL, look up the corresponding new URL (or notify you if you haven't already set one up) and redirect it with a 301 HTTP response (Moved Permanently) - which means that when Google re-crawls your site, it will update all its URLs.

 

If that's your URL structure I'd definitely recommend a change whether you moved to WordPress or not. It's much better for your SEO (and for your human visitors) to have URLS like:

 

/recipes/curries/murgh-badam-pasanda

 

than

 

/foodpages01/recip0001.htm

Edited September 14, 201214 yr by Renaissance-Design

I use a PC so not sure I could follow your instructions.

 

I know what you are saying about file and folder names. The style of naming started back in 2000 when it wasn't important and there was no need to change . . . although now anything that will improve SEO must be done. New sites I work on have relevant folder and file names but the thought of changing a 5,000 page web site . . .

 

Another question that is of big importance for recipes (or will be when Google UK adopts them) is the addition of tags to recipes. This is the sort of thing:

 

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Recipe">

<span itemprop="name">Mom's World Famous Banana Bread</span>

<span itemprop="description">This classic banana bread recipe comes from my mom -- the walnuts add a nice texture and flavor to the banana bread.</span>

Ingredients:
<span itemprop="ingredients">3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed</span>
<span itemprop="ingredients">1 egg</span>
<span itemprop="ingredients">3/4 cup of sugar</span>

Instructions:
<span itemprop="recipeInstructions">
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix in the ingredients in a bowl. Add the flour last. Pour the mixture into a loaf pan and bake for one hour.
</span>

</div>

 

Would it be possible to set up an easier way of doing this within WordPress rather than what I have to do in HTML which is going into the code and edit there which is very slow and time consuming?

Edited September 14, 201214 yr by Renaissance-Design
Added code formatting

Yup - you'd just need to set up the appropriate fields in WordPress' admin and in your template. Your markup could do with a bit of semantic flavouring too:

 

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Recipe">
<h1 itemprop="name">Mom's World Famous Banana Bread</h1>
<p itemprop="description">This classic banana bread recipe comes from my mom -- the walnuts add a nice texture and flavor to the banana bread.</p>
<h2>Ingredients:</h2>
<ul>
<li itemprop="ingredients">3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed</li>
<li itemprop="ingredients">1 egg</li>
<li itemprop="ingredients">3/4 cup of sugar</li>
</ul>
<h2>Instructions:</h2>
<p itemprop="recipeInstructions">Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix in the ingredients in a bowl. Add the flour last. Pour the mixture into a loaf pan and bake for one hour.</p>
</article>

 

The template would contain only the structure, and WP would spit out the content into the right markup - once the templates are set up, you should never have to write any markup when adding content.

Edited September 14, 201214 yr by Renaissance-Design