Everyone tends to do it. It takes a conscious effort to not do it. I mean, you are a rational person. You believe everything you believe and think everything that you think. Why wouldn’t everyone else think and believe the same way? What are they? Morons?

It's really easy to believe that everyone else is like you. They aren't.

When you are designing your site and writing your content, do it from the users point of view, not your own. They are the ones that you have created this magnificent new web site for, so honor them by talking in their language and answering their questions and meeting their needs.

The first step to do this is to define just who they are. Once you have them defined, forget everyone else. If you want to sell video games, your site will look much different then if you want to sell medical equipment.

It might be helpful to write down your definition of your users and tape it to your monitor, where you can remember them while you’re writing.

Their words, their needs, their solutions. That’s what you need to focus on.

A lot of people are looking for this information, so I figure I should expand on it and tell you exactly what I did and how you can convert any existing web site into a WordPress themed site too.

How To Convert An Existing Site To WordPress

Text Edit
Did I mention that you need a text editor to make WordPress theme files? MS Word will not work. You MUST be able edit the files and save them as “text” files. They can not be formatted in any way. On Windows, look for WordPad. On a Mac, look for TextEdit. Do not make them RTF, or Rich Text Format. Just save the files as simple old text.

Quick shout out for BBEdit on a Mac. The ultimate text editor and if you’re going to be doing this, worth every penny. It does not suck. Says so right on the box.

Set Up Dev
Before we get any farther, you’ll need a development installation of WordPress that you can play with and break. It can’t share the database with an existing installation, or the theme you pick here will be the theme that the existing site will get at the same time.

If you do not have an installation of WordPress yet, install it and we’ll just play with it until we’re happy with the new theme. No one is looking. No one cares. Feel free to break it all you want.

If you do have an existing installation, you need to make another installation. It’s easy, but pay attention. You will have the existing site in your top level. You’ll probably have a “wordpress” folder with all of the files in it, in that top level. Make a copy, or upload a new copy, of WordPress right next to that folder. Name the new folder “dev”. You will now have the existing Worpress in “wordpress” and the new one right next to it, named “dev”.

Take the existing wp-config.php file and download it to your hard drive, where you can edit it. Open it up and look for the line that says ” $table_prefix = ‘wp_’; “. That “wp_” is the prefix for all of the tables in the database that WordPress uses. We don’t want to create a new database. We want to create new tables inside the existing database. We leave everything else in this file alone, but we change the “wp_” to “dev_”. Our new installation will see that and go create a new set of tables, all with names beginning with “dev_”.

Upload that wp-config.php file and upload it to our new “dev” installation. It should be next to all of the other “wp-”folders, at the top level.

Now, we’ll let WordPress do it’s thing. This is where the WordPress is so much better than any other Content Management System out there. We’ll finish the installation using your web browser.

Go to the home page of the new “dev” WordPress installation. If you have a previous installation, type in that URL, followed by /dev/, which is the folder that we put the dev WordPress. If this is a new installation, then you can go to the new home page. You should be looking at a new installation page that says “welcome”. You need to fill in the Name of the new site and your email address.

Click on the Install WordPress button. Wait for a really long time while WordPress goes out and updates the database and installs all of the information that it needs. This might take up 10 seconds on a slow day.

You will be looking at a Success! page. The user name is “admin” and the password is some totally obscure random string. Log into the new site and look around. You now have a development site that we can install themes on and break if we want to.

Lift and Separate
We want to go back to looking at the existing site that you want to convert. We want to lift the HTML from it and separate it into WordPress theme files.

The basic task is to separate out the “theme” elements from the “content” elements. If you have a stack of HTML files on your server and you’re not sure how they all work, download them and look at them in a text editor.

You need to have some background in HTML to know what you are looking at. You’re going to have to read the HTML and figure out what it is doing. You’ll see a lot of stuff at the top, in the <head> section. The next should be the header area, all the stuff at the top. Somewhere down after that, will be what looks like content, the actual writing.

Your task, and this is the hardest part, is to figure out exactly where the “top” stuff stops and the “content” stuff starts. It could be a table cell. It could be a <div> tag. You need to find that point.

In the simplest form, there’s a bunch of HTML, then there’s content, then there’s a bunch more HTML. The goal is to slice that HTML into files named “header.php”, “sidebar.php”, “footer.php”, and most importantly, “index.php”. There could be others, but we’ll talk about that later.

Slice off the top stuff and put it in the “header.php” file. Figure out where the side bar stuff might come and copy it into that. You don’t really need a sidebar file if you don’t want to have one or you might want a couple, using sidebar-right.php and sidebar-left.php. You’ll have to go through your code and look at the layout of the page.

Take the bottom stuff and put it in the footer.php. You saw that coming, didn’t you?

You’re left with the content. You need to create an “index.php” file. At the top, you want to have the tag <?php get_header(); ?>. At the bottom, you want to have the <?php get_footer(); ?> tag. You can put your sidebars in where you want them, before or after the content, for left or right.

In the middle of the index page, you want to put in the magic PHP tags that display the content. Open up the default theme index.php file and look at it. Copy everything starting at the <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> tag down to the <?php endif; ?> tag. You’ll get a bunch of “class=entry” and “php_content()” tags.

Save all of these files into a new theme folder. You’re doing all of this on your hard drive. Name the new theme whatever you want. “MyNewTheme” sounds great. Copy the style sheet from the default theme into your new theme folder. If you already have a style sheet from your original site, use that instead.

Open the .css style sheet file. You want to have the new name so that it shows up in the Appearance page in WordPress. At the top of the file, you need to have at least “/* Theme Name: MyNewTheme */”. The slash and asterisk means that it’s “commented out” so that it doesn’t interfere with the style sheet. Don’t use the quotes, just the slashes and asterisks. Look at the default theme style sheet or the codex for more info. This is minimum.

Upload and Look
Upload your theme folder to the “wp-content” themes folder, next to the default and classic themes. Go to your Themes page in WordPress admin and see if your theme is there. If it is, select it and activate it. Hold your breathe and “View Site”.

Did it work? Did it break? If you have horrible text that displays PHP error messages, read what they say and try to figure out where the error is. It’s probably a missing closing tag or a missing semi-colon. I hate those.

Did it display something, but it’s all out of whack? You need to play with the style sheets and the theme files to get it to display correctly.

Fix it
The simplest situation here is that you copied the code straight out of the original files and plopped it in here and it all works.

The issues could be style sheets, missing code, or badly written HTML. The more you change from original, the more you need to know what you are doing.

Pages
After you get it working and looking right, you want to create new pages for each page in the new site. Just create them and put some gibberish for now. You just want a place holder. Make sure that the menu points to the right places. Menus will be the next issue.

Existing Pages
If you have pages that you just don’t want to convert, you can put them into the Worpdress top folder, so that they act like normal pages. In my example, all of the portfolio pages are still hard coded PHP files. http://www.flowerart.biz/portfolio/ I needed to make sure the menus work, but those are hard coded pages. They are not visible in WordPress, but they are visible to the user. Read “Put A WordPress Menu In An External Page” to see how I made the menus dynamic on a hard coded page.

Menus
If you want to have dynamic menus, where pages are added to the menu when you create the pages, then you need to read through the codex about menu tags and their attributes. It’s possible to cut out the hard coded HTML menu that you had and replace it with a dynamic one. See where to cut out the old one and replace it with the new tags.

Different Templates
If you have different templates for different pages, you need to know what the differences are. If you need to create a new template for each page, you can do that. Go into each old HTML file, cut out the “contents” and replace it per the directions above. Now, create a new file that will act like that specific page’s index.php file. I like to name them all starting with “template_”, so you might have template_aboutus.php.

These new template pages need to have all of the tags of the others, header() and footer() and that stuff. It’s possible to have a template page that is entirely custom HTML and not even use the content() tags. You won’t be able to edit it, but it’ll show up on the site and be managed like other pages.

Each one of these new template pages needs to have the commented out lines at the top of the file that has the name in this format: “/* Template Name: About Us */”, again, without the quotes.

Upload this new file to the theme folder, next to the index.php file. Go back to the page that needs to use this template. On the right, there’s a “Template” drop down menu that should now list all of the template files that contain that “Template Name:” line in them. Select the one you want to use for that page and update.

Go look at it. You will have to customize and fix each template to make sure it works with the pages that you want.

Final Touches
You will have to go through each page and make sure that the menus work and that they look right. You can use the default theme as a guide. You can look up specific problems in the codex or the forums or you can ask me.

From here on out, it will be stylesheets and php tags to get it to look and work right. If you have a specific problem, let me know in the comments below and we can walk through it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. How much it costs will depend on how optimized you want it to be. Nothing in SEO costs any money, only time. You should learn what the techniques are and then you should do them your self.

SEO just wants to be free.
Don't pay for it.

The first thing that you must do, MUST do, is to pick some keywords or phrases that you want to rank highly for. The best way to do this is to think about it from your users point of view. What problem are they trying to solve when they come to your site. Why should they be there? Wedding Flowers? Car Repair? Pizza? a TV Show? What are those words that they will type into Google to find you?

It’s good to get one main phrase that you was to own. That phrase will go everywhere on your site, so many times that’s annoying.

Now you need to pick 3-5 more phrases that you want to do well for. Maybe you won’t own these, but you still want traffic from them.

Remember, these phrases must be from the user’s point of view, not yours. You might think that you sell “water treatment systems”, but your users want to buy “water softeners”. You might think that you sell “hand made, one of a kind, jewelry”, but I’m looking for a “woman birthday gift”. You might think you sell “woman’s action wear”, but my wife’s looking for “woman sports clothes”.

Now that that has rolled around in your head for a while, you can write down the phrases that you want to rank well for and the one that you want to own.

Next, you can scatter those phrases around your site and ask for links from other sites. Make your title on every page contain that main phrase. Leave comments on other sites using those phrases. Do all of the other SEO stuff that you can find on the Internet and that I’ll talk about later.

SEO just wants to be free. Don’t pay for it.

The New and Native Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene

I visited “The New and Native Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene and Greene” at the Huntington Library today. It was a rainy day, but the exhibit closes in 2 days, so this was our last chance. The rain kept the riff raff out, so it was not crowded and it was a pleasant experience.

Greene and Greene

The thing that struck me about what I saw today was how their ideas and ideals were forced upon their clients. They had the audacity to believe that they were artists and that their clients should appreciate that. Is the customer always right? Uummm…yeah, kind of.

When they were building the Pratt house in Ojai, the owner complained about missed schedules and cost overruns. Anyone who’s built a web site knows how that works. Their response was that even though they appreciated the frustration of the owner, what he was getting was not just house, but a work of art, which takes time and effort to complete properly and would be well worth it in the end. I’ve seen the house and it’s magnificent. I’m not sure Mr Pratt was satisfied.

During the depression, they still made magnificent houses, but not as many. They still charged the same high prices. They were creating art and it could not be achieved with shortcuts.

The balance between the business and the creative process was a delicate one. In their case, the business suffered in service to the art, finally being dissolved in 1922. What they achieved has stood the test of critics and time and is as amazing today as it was then. They created a whole new way of building houses, with a new attitude behind how life should be lived in these houses.

Is it worth it to sacrifice business for art? I don’t know. I need to pay the mortgage and eat, but beyond that, maybe art is the greater calling. Were they self indulgent, self centered, and egomaniacal? Maybe. So is Steve Jobs and I love my iPhone. He’s a billionaire.

As much as our users need to be considered in our web design, we, as the developers, the creators of the web site, need to instill our passion, our vision, our knowledge of how things SHOULD be into every web site. As much as I love SEO and WordPress and AdSense and marketing, our one true goal, our pure artistic vision, needs to be embodied in our web sites. Maybe there’s art in SEO. Maybe marketing is an art too.

Gamble House, Pasadena, CA

I think that as we lose the need for money, as we let that go and accept being poor, in the pursuit of artistic vision, in the pursuit of our passion, of what we love and know is the best, I think that then, and only then, does the money seem to come back in response. As we push it away and turn towards the artistic ideal, somehow, the money seems to be attracted back to that ideal. Maybe that’s a little too idealistic, too simplistic, I mean there’s always the lottery, but it does seem to be a tendency in life.

Don’t let the pursuit of money ruin your passion. Don’t let worry cloud your vision. Be who you are and the money will follow.

In 1943, in retirement, Charles Sumner Greene said “I did not always give them what they wanted, but always what they liked.

Quoting from The Role of Design in Modern Church Marketing [Design Principles]

Yet the recent image makeover of churches is unpalatable for some. In 2006, Pastor John MacArthur published a popular article (“Grunge Christianity?”) condemning modern churches that trade sanctity for “cultural relevancy.” MacArthur and his supporters disagree with so-called pragmatists who seek bigger, more worldly congregations. Nathan Smith (GodBit.com) counters, “we are naive if we try to take an isolationist approach. God wants a direct relationship with each person, so we—as facilitators of that calling—have to meet people through what they know, and if that is pop culture, then so be it.”

How many congregations identify with dark, gritty imagery?

So what about the multitude of recent church web sites designed around ragged, dark, asymmetrical elements—what does this communicate about the church? How many congregations identify with dark, gritty imagery?

Read the entire article at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/design-modern-church-marketing/

What traffic are you missing?

As we drilled into the content part of it, I saw that no one, as in not one person, was looking through his portfolio pages. I realized that these pages have a smaller menu over to the side that people could easily miss.

Also, when I redesigned his site by bringing it into WordPress (of course), the top, main menu now has a different look and action than the original small portfolio menu. I used to just put a glow around the highlighted menu item and now I was doing the whole colored div background, which is much more apparent.

Now we have a menu that looks and functions differently and no one who ever clicks on them. HHHmmmm. What to do?

Next step, I put in the same style menu as the top, so they highlight the same. That should improve the click on those. We’ll be watching his stats to see what happens.

Read your Analytics pages today. What traffic are you missing?

Quoting from WordPress Sermons Plugin :: 4:14 evangelical christian theology blog

The Sermon Browser WordPress Plugin allows churches to simply upload sermons to their WordPress website, where they can be searched, listened to, and downloaded. It is easy to use with comprehensive help and tutorials. Features include:

1. Sermons can be searched by topic, preacher, bible passage or date.
2. Full podcasting capabilities, including custom podcasts for individual users.
3. Sermons uploaded in mp3 format can be played directly on your website using the 1PixelOut Audio Player.
4. An optional sidebar widget displays sermons on all of your posts or pages.
5. Embed videos from sites such as YouTube or Google Video.
6. Other file types can also be uploaded, including PDF, Powerpoint, Word, text and RTF. Multiple files can be attached to single sermons.
7. The full Bible text of the passage being preached on can be included on each sermon page (seven different versions, including ESV).
8. Files can be uploaded to your own site through the browser or via FTP. Alternatively you can use other free audio hosting sites such as Odeo.
9. Powerful templating function allows complete customisation to complement the look of your site.
10. Simple statistics show how often each sermon has been listened to.
11. Compatible with WordPress MU.
12. Extensive help and tutorial screencasts.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.4-14.org.uk/wordpress-plugins/sermon-browser

Quoting from adn.com | Church visits : Guest Blog -Top 10 Church Website Design Mistakes of 2007

Get to the point.

There is something to be said about Shakespeare’s oft-quoted assertion from Hamlet:

‘… brevity is the soul of wit …‘

Or as usability expert Jakob Nielsen writes his 1997 post entitled “how people read the web:”

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

Read the entire article at:
http://community.adn.com/node/131981

Penn Jillete is an atheist. Even though I’m a Christian, I really respect people who are thoughtful atheists. At least they thought about something, even if the conclusion is wrong. Most people, probably 90%, have a vague belief in God, but have never really thought about it much.

This is an amazing video. Penn has some very thoughtful things to say about how much Christians must hate everyone else.

If you are involved with a church that does not have a web site, I can show you how to get one for free, using WordPress.com. All it takes is a little initiative on your part and you can have a web site. You don’t need a $300 site. You don’t need a $500 site. You can have a free web site for your church. Go to www.worpdress.com and follow the instructions.

Do it now. For the children.

Quoting from The Church In 2009 – KYPost.com

Close to half of the churches offer Web pages.

For example, local churches have caught up with the secular society in their use of computers and technology. In 1998, fewer than one in five U.S. congregations hosted Web sites; today, close to half of the churches offer Web pages to their members and local community. A friend of mine who ministers to a large Washington, D.C. Baptist congregation has a frequently updated interactive Web site whose volunteer editor works from India.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.kypost.com/content/middleblue3/story/The-Church-In-2009/o3oMerab5E2upfPeBvDqdg.cspx