Ask the Blogger!

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Question: My website now has more than 500 html pages. The task of making changes on my site has become too time consuming, not to mention the wear and tear on my poor fingers and wrists of a million copy-and-pastes. Should I move my static html website to a blog/cms solution instead?

The answer is a definite YES! In fact, it is this blogger’s opinion that anyone who produces content online should be using a blog software, or a content managment solution, to manage and publish that content.

There are so many reasons why you need to move away from having static html. Here are the main ones I can think of. Below are some options and tools you can use to make the switch.

Why move my static html website to a blogging platform?

#1 - Because the search engines like the way that blogs organize information. It’s very “neat and tidy” to them, which means they like the structure, which allows them to easily find what they need.

#2 - Managing html is so 2000. Seriously, even if you know html like I do, there’s no need to actually use it in today’s publishing world online. When your content is in a blog platform, you can simple edit it anytime without having to have an html editor open, and worrying about messing something up.

#3 - Blog software like Wordpress.org is built with server side includes built right into the designs/themes. In other words, if you are using Wordpress, and you wanted to change the header image on your blog, you simple edit one file and the image is changed on all 500 pages of your blog. If you have an old html static website, and you don’t have includes in place, you’re either going to have to do a search and replace (which can be tricky) or manually open every page and make the changes.

What tools should I use to make the move?

I highly suggest using Wordpress.org, which is what this blog uses, and best of all it’s free. If you are looking for something not so “bloggy”, I highly encourage you to use a piece of software called Article Manager from Interactive Tools.