Editing Edge - Business Copywriting
Lesley Hussell, of Editing Edge, wanted to work on the Search Engine Optimization of her website and asked if I could help. It was written with a Content Management System called "Lathyrus Real Simple CMS for Designers". The CMS was coded in PHP and had a MySQL database to hold pages and blog posts but the HTML that it generated was not particularly well formed.
Had I tried to change the site as it was, she would have been stuck with a website that couldn't do some of the things we have grown to expect from a website. So I suggested migrating the site to WordPress. The new site looks very much like the original site but under the covers it is so much better for SEO AND it's now a lot easier for Lesley to work on.
The major challenges with the migration were in developing solutions to ensure the content was migrated successfully:
- Custom plugin to migrate the database content from the RSCMS database to WordPress pages and posts
- Custom plugin to strip unwanted div tags from the posts
- Two custom plugins to reproduce over 130 raw HTML files as a single dynamic WordPress page with each page indexed on the sitemap.
- Custom styling of the Artisteer generated theme to closely match the original theme - including custom headers and custom background images
Along the way I developed many improvements to the oik plugin. For more details on oik visit the oik-plugins website.