Convert an Existing Site to WordPress

Back in the dark ages, the days before WordPress, I created a site for a friend using the latest and greatest methods of the day, tables. I happened to be great at laying out and implementing tables for designing web pages. I even taught a class in how to do it for the large aerospace company I worked for back then. This was back when we were still afraid of the Millennium Bug.

I taught him how to replace images when he wanted and how to write a bit of PHP and HTML. He learned, but I don’t think that he ever made any changes, maybe a few images. This is a wedding flower site, so there are a lot of images.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. He wants to add some videos and a video page. I have just written a book on how WordPress is so wonderful for everything, so I figure I really need to convert his old school web site into WordPress.

WordPress is great with CSS and I’m a huge believer in CSS myself, so it was particularly difficult to read this old code that I wrote years ago, using tables. One of the cool design features of his site is that every page is a bit different in layout. There are random images strewn about the place. I used multiple templates and passed variables to change the images.

To convert the old site to WordPress, without having to recreate the whole thing, meant that I needed to create new template pages for each section, using the existing tables, then assign the templates to the pages.

I threw in a div in the middle for the content on most. The front page is totally custom, so I actually have the template as the entire HTML page, with no content displayed at all. It’s just an HTML page.

The tricky part was the menus. I learned how to do child menus for the Venues pages, so that each venue gets its’ own page with a submenu of all other venue pages, because they are children of the Venue page which lists them all. I’ll do another post on menus to explain that better.

It took a lot of tweaks, but I finally got it to work. The decisions had to be made on which data would be hard coded and what would be “content”. He’s got to have the freedom to make changes to a lot of it, but I didn’t want him to be able to make changes to other parts.

I think it turned out OK. Please don’t view the source on it, unless you want to see some ugly code. Ack. It all works though. It’s possible to convert an existing site into WordPress.

http:/www.flowerart.biz