15 Jun 12 3:46 pm
To my knowledge that's not an easy job and I don't know of any "converter" tool to help you. Anyone know of such a tool?
What I'd do is to set up an empty WordPress system, then carefully choose a theme you like, which fits the layout of your current site well - unless you want all the extra work of also changing the basic layout of the pages.
My choice is always a top quality commercial template, because they offer the most flexibility and customization - which you'll need in a case like this. Some of the more popular free themes which were created by the WordPress organization themselves, are also top quality and rather flexible.
I (and many marketers) favor the Studio Press "Genesis" framework and its "Child Themes". Of course you may want to use the Affilotheme offered here, which is already optimized for affiliate marketing, as well as being part of the Affiloblueprint training.
In either case, the big chore is to copy and paste the content from your old pages into newly created WordPress pages. To limit the amount of text formatting you have to do over again, copy the page's HTML source code and paste it into the WordPress "HTML view" of the WordPress page or post editor.
Which brings up the design decision of which content to use as Posts and which as Pages - a decision you'll need to make before starting to copy and paste. A static site doesn't have this distinction. So you could just recreate a WordPress blog as if it were a static website by creating only WordPress "pages" - then adding posts in future, if you wanted them.
You'll find that WordPress "has its way" with your HTML markup - by modifying some of your HTML and not supporting some other HTML tags, etc. So you WILL have to do some re-formatting of text.
There are WordPress plugins to defeat WordPress changes to your old HTML and leave all HTML editing strictly up to you to do manually. Sorry, I don't know the plugin names and have not tried them myself. These plugins are like telling WordPress, "Keep your dirty hands off my code!". But then you have to do even the tiniest edits yourself.
Once you're happy with your new blog, you can use a site-wide 301 ("moved permanently") redirect to take everyone invisibly from your old site to the new one. GoDaddy has a 301 redirect tool which has worked OK for me.
You could also do 301 redirects on a page-by-page basis, if you think the conversion will take a long time and you'd like to have your visitors see your new pages ASAP. Bit of a "can of worms" to do it that way though. Might be a visual shock, if the new pages are radically different looking than the old ones - and it could create navigation problems between the 2 sites - and other issues. Probably best to wait until the whole new site is done, then do a single, site-wide redirect.
Anyone else been through this?
Hope this helps...
_jim coe
