Advice for template

[felku]

Until now all my sites are in html. One thing that I find difficult is at the moment of adding new pages. It is difficult when a number of pages is reached. I read many people saying that wordpress is the best option. Right now I'm starting to gain some ranking and I'm afraid that any big chance can affect my serps. I just need an advice about what I can do.

[genro11]

It's okay to risk for a better template just to be at ease on writing another content. SERP ranking may drop you for good but I guess what matter to this one is how good are you on optimizing a website and it's for you to answer that. Even it's another CMS, I guess you can pull that one out.

[ocreditor]

hi felku,
you're afraid your rank or search engine results will be affected by a change of template?
why would you not assume it will change for the better?
wordpress is nice to work with and could make it easy (easier) for you to reconquer positions and improve too. it's not for no reason that you're considering a switch, right?

best of luck

[felku]

Thanks for the advices, one of my problems is that I like my template and until now I haven't be successful replicate a similar template in wordpress and I don't have the budget to find someone to do it for me.

[genro11]

I see but I guess to easily forget the role of the static website, I guess you should consider changing something like dealing with a new life with another wordpress template. The fact that you actually consider our advices, well you should give it another risky thing to do some change and start with the design of your new website.

[DaveL]

I managed to recreate my standard HTML templates into a nice wordpress theme template via a website that converted them for you for about $10. http://www.themespress.com/ - it takes a bit of fiddle, but if you've built you HTML in a semi decent manner, it's very easy to convert using that. I've been using the converted templates for a couple of years now with no issues.

Wordpress isn't always the best option. Sometimes just sticking to plain old HTML can be the way to go. I'm currently converting my old site which was all .shtml files to .php files with a completely new layout, directory structure. It's a 1000+ pages, and I'm sticking to normal html pages as it's a lot easier to make site wider layout changes using my DreamWeaver templates than in Wordpress. Part of the site is Wordpress, for the updates, but as the template theme for Wordpress was one I built myself originally, it's really easy to integrate the two.

If you do change file URLs, don't forget to 301 them in the .htaccess to the new address, that way you shouldn't lose any rankings. I recently changed another of my old sites, and ended up with a .htaccess that redirected over 400 pages to their new locations. No problems came from that, and in many cases, rankings improved. The site I'm working on now will have a .htaccess file with around 4,000 redirects in it, which should be interesting and also cause my backside to do the 5p 10p dance when the indexing starts...

[felku]

I wasn't so sure of changing but it is difficult update the sites in html especially when your expanding your portfolio of sites. Thanks for the site, I will look and give it a try.