Well, I’ve finally decided to ditch the old school method of running a web site and move entirely over to a content management system. Since the majority of my site content consists of blog posts, I have decided that WordPress is a good choice. I have been using WordPress for my blog for some time and I have been happy with it so I thought, why not use it for the whole site?
I made this decision not because I have any great difficulties managing the site using old school static html files but because this way is much easier to add content to. It is also much easier to redo the site look without having to monkey with a large number of files and I no longer have to maintain stylesheets and so on if I don’t feel like it.
So far, I have brought the entire blog history across as well as the main web site pages. I have taken the opportunity to eliminate a few pages that were horribly out of date and not terribly useful. I have not finished bringing over the deep content pages, however. That may take some time as there is much fiddly work involved in doing so. I have, however, ensured that the internal linking structure of those pages will bring viewers back to the new WordPress installation instead of leaving them in limbo.
After tinkering with various WordPress themes, I think I have found one that I am happy with. It follows largely in the same vein as my older site layout, being largely text based with relatively little fancy layout gimmickry. That makes me even happier because it means I don’t have to monkey with creating a theme for WordPress which, while it is something I could do if I chose to, I really don’t feel the need to get that deep into WordPress.
This whole adventure has left me somewhat awed by the progress that web site publishing has made over the past ten years. When I made my first foray into blogging back in 2003, the state of the art was quite basic. Content management systems were just becoming a mainstream concept and blogging wasn’t really on most people’s radar. Back then, I rolled my own blog software which I used in one form or another until I switched to WordPress. Now, I have finally jumped on the content management system bandwagon though, in all honesty, the state of the art for that arrived a couple of years ago. It was really just inertia that kept me using the same old system since then. No doubt the next seven years will result in similar advancements which will be interesting to witness.