Combining ALL the things!

November 2, 2011 5:04 PM

Hope me! I have a Wordpress foodie blog and I have a kitchenware retail website. I want to take the blog and export it to my website. Somehow. It gets a little more complicated and I'd really appreciate some help walking me through the various procedures. Wise advise on blog organisation would also be deeply appreciated. Apologies in advance for the longwinded rambling to follow.

Years ago I set up a blog which I'll call myoldblog.wordpress.com. I then started a business and made a website mybusiness.com.au. Thinking that it would be a good idea to try to link the two, I started a new wordpress blog mybusiness.wordpress.com and exported my old blog post and comments to the new blog. I left the old one up as it was attracting some good traffic from Google but made it obvious that it was now defunct and not being updated. People still comment on it anyway. However people also comment on the new one as well so salvaging both lots of comments would be nice if possible. I understand that the traffic from Google would be lost as the links change - regrettable but not a disaster.

And part two is that I'd like to put my food blog up there alongside my retail business - they're complimentary and I think one would drive pageviews to the other. My business site is basic HTML that I wrote on Frontpage a long time ago and could do with a new redesign.

What's the best way of combining the two things? I'm happy using Wordpress running the blog side of things but the templates don't seem to work for the retail stuff I'm after and I don't have enough experience to tailor-make one and not a lot of time to learn. I'd hire someone but I've no idea where to start or what to pay. Where the hell do I start with this? I'm really damn confused!

posted by ninazer0 to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Combining all the things is actually not that complicated because there are not, in fact, so many things.

What you actually want is a retail site with a blog, with all of the old entries and comments from mybusiness.wordpress.com imported. You need to install Wordpress at mybusiness.com.au. "Retail site with blog" is a very standard Wordpress configuration these days. Wordpress can manage, easily, both the business retail pages and the blog. You can use a plugin like Cart66 for the retail bits. There is a paid version but there is also a free lite version.

Dump myoldblog.wordpress.com. Just dump it. The duplicate content, which you're about to make triplicate content, is a nightmare.

If you want to hire someone, the point of hiring someone is that they will have done this many times before and know exactly what to do. I promise you that as ecommerce projects go, this is not a huge mountain!
posted by DarlingBri at 7:22 PM on November 2, 2011

I have to maintain a bunch of websites, and we recently had to launch a new one, migrating lots of old content to a new design, and reworking old links. I've had to do this before and it will be hard. However, this time I shelled out for BackupBuddy, and that made the experience a lot less painful. I set up a test subdomain and made sure everything was how I wanted and then was able to migrate it in less than five minutes to the correct domain without any broken links, lost design or plug-ins or hassle.

Do you have google analytics installed on any of your domains? Or any kind of stats package? Your webhost might have one installed by default. You can identify the pages that get the most hits on your old website and have them automatically redirected to the new content. The plugin I'm using is Quick Page/Post Redirect DEV, but there are a whole bunch, some which will look for a unique page title or terms and best match it.

Make sure your 404 error page has a search button on it or a plug-in that automatically shows related content so people following a broken link see content one-click away.

I got the template I ended up customizing on themeforest.net, which is an extensive and fairly easy to use collection of professional themes, with decent support. You can buy it direct from the designer too.

What we did was use a lot of html and design on the pages at the top of the navigation, and then use posts with tags/categories to sort them for a subsection. We set ours so all the posts - the blog part - go into www.domain.com/news/.

That way it's all on the same domain, and branded with the same look and feel.
posted by viggorlijah at 8:55 PM on November 2, 2011

Viggorlijah, you've managed to answer questions I didn't know I had. Well done!
posted by ninazer0 at 5:13 PM on November 3, 2011