Converted my old legal info site from HTML to WP. God Bless WordPress.

Yes, God Bless WordPress! It’s almost a dream come true, and I could hardly be happier with it.

WordPress has helped me realize the fantasy I had for my good-sized legal info website 4 years ago when I started it. I had always hoped for an easily updatable website, but I could never figure out how to do it using pure old hand-coded HTML (with a complex HTML theme).

After 4 years of fighting with hand-coded HTML, I finally took the plunge and converted Tim’s Missouri Employment Law Info Site – TimsLaw.com to WordPress. I practiced with WordPress for a year before the conversion – WP drives my political blog, RadMod.com. I recommend you practice with WordPress long and hard before you try to convert an established website.

WordPress was relatively easy to learn. And easy to adapt to my wishes. I have been able to preserve my same old reliable 3-column layout, and just pop-in the PHP bells and whistles that make my site Much more useful.

What a Joy it is to be able to edit my pages without having to run the changes thru the validator, and then upload the pages via FTP. And I have my own decent Search function now, thru a plugin. I even have a dynamically-updated sitemap – – – No more manually editing the hand-coded HTML sitemap!!!

Now I can use a template, to automatically change the entire site. You guys who never fussed with large hand coded HTML sites might not appreciate the freedom from drudgery.

WordPress really is a light content management system, as well as a great pure blogging package. I think my two websites offer some proof of that proposition. The only thing missing is version control.

I use Posts for content, no pages, by the way, which is a different approach from others’ choices here in this forum.

And, I even set my permalinks to retain my old pre-conversion URLS and internal link structure. WOW! Permalinks can be set as follows: / % postname %.htm [close up the spaces]. Now your articles will all appear as if they are html files in the root of the site, which is a common organizational scheme among hand coded HTML sites [and it lets you move articles around from category to category without your visitors getting 404s from older search engine links].

Mucho Thanks to the WordPress developers.

As a special thank you to the WordPress community at large, I’ve done some fairly extensive WordPress-related blogging on both of the above-linked websites, so others can learn from my experiences.

To those of you having horrible problems getting everything up and running: Did you jump in water that was too deep? Did you start small, with the default theme, and then slowly add complexity? Did you RTFM? The codex [and Lorelle!] are wonderful resources.