Should I switch our site to WordPress?

[Bohak]

We started a newspaper about four years ago and in the hopes of giving our artists, musicians and writers more exposure and getting more interaction from our audience, Im thinking it might be good to convert our site to a blogsite. Here is our current site:
Welcome to The Beachside Resident

I came across this site Drift Magazine and I liked the jukebox and built in galleries that will make the online version of our newspaper more interesting and easier to manage.

I guess I'd like some feedback as to whether this is a good idea. Should I make part of it a blog and keep part of it html? Are blogs as easy to market to search engines? Is it true that once you start to get 10,000 hits per day WordPress gets bogged down? Having no experience with blogs, will I have trouble building and designing one?

Thank you.

[incrediblehelp]

If it makes your life easier in the long run and the website more visitor friendly then do it.

[Bohak]

Thanks.

But I hope I get more feedback.

Our site contains quite a bit of information. If I knew it was going to make my life and our audience's life easier I wouldnt have posted this question. The question is, is it a good idea for our company to make this transition? Like I said, I have no experience with WordPress.

I'll edit the question.


I came across this site Drift Magazine and I liked the jukebox and built in galleries that would make the online version of our newspaper more interesting and easier to manage if WordPress is stable and as user friendly as it claims to be.

[sushil]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

If it makes your life easier in the long run and the website more visitor friendly then do it.

Basically you don't do to swith your website to wordpress but as the word of incrediblehep he is right if it make you life easier then you should need to do it.

[Bohak]

My question:
I came across this site Drift Magazine and I liked the jukebox and built in galleries that would make the online version of our newspaper more interesting and easier to manage if WordPress is stable and as user friendly as it claims to be.

The answer:
If it makes your life easier in the long run and the website more visitor friendly then do it.

Thats incredible.

Thanks anyway.

[Chuckmiser]

I have been debating this as well I use blogger hosted on my site but some of the Web 2.0 gurus are saying that you need the additional funtionality of word press.

Question is it worth changing for, or work with the current and hope that they will catch up?

[Bohak]

Yea,
Im not sure what to do. I thought this would be the place to get more info on it but I really got nothing except "if it makes it easier, than do it".

Ive noticed alot of sites are being built with WordPress type templates, and it seems like a good move, I just would like to know the pros and cons from someone familiar with my situation. Im sure there are alot of newspaper publishers that are in this same situation. The newspaper industry has been taking a dive for a while now, but by focusing more on their online presence, publishers are seeing an increase in their audiences. I would like to revamp our site as well, but before I do, I would like to get some advice on the best road to take.

If anyone knows of a forum that has more info on this topic let me know.
Thanks.

[incrediblehelp]

Bohak people are not going to make business decisions for you on SEO forum, nor should you take business advice as gospel on SEO forum.

[rizzoid]

Joomla! (Joomla!) is free, pretty easy to setup, and may have more serious functioning as far as users access and subscriptions. Get the Community Builder add-on and you'd be very powerful, very quickly. Drupal is also an option, but a little harder to use than Joomla.
-r

[bj]

The search engines love wordpress sites, and the RSS and other features can really help get a site into the early returns on the SEs. You can import all the content and manage it through the wordpress interface, and not have to keep part in static html.

Also, of all the systems I template for (including Joomla, Drupal, Modx, Movable Type, TextPattern, etc) Wordpress is, without a doubt, the easiest to use and extend.

[stabilpa]

Sure, I'll add my two cents.

WordPress can be convinced to be a full-fledged CMS, and will make managing all future content pretty easy. There are a lot of plugins available for it to give your site added utility, and you can do some pretty cool SEO-optimization with it.

I like WordPress a lot, but it still feels sort of ... bloggy. :-/

Out of the box, I've been finding Drupal to be much more flexible lately. Probably because I don't think blog; I think brochure or magazine or newspaper. I think it's pretty easy to put existing content into Drupal and create URL-aliases for it that are the same as the URLs for your site's previous incarnation. And Drupal is also pretty SEO-friendly.

You're probably thinking that I am adding to the confusion. Sorry about that. Feel free to PM for some sample sites I've put together in Drupal --- I think you'll see its flexibility and appropriateness for your project.

The big drawback of Drupal versus Wordpress? It takes a bit more technical savvy to deal with Drupal than WordPress. If you're able to deal with that, the increased flexibility is really cool.

Good luck with your decision.

[dean]

I would strongly suggest that you try out wordpress first on a local setup like winlamp or something.
I'm sort of doing that myself right now, but I'm just a part-timer. It's not difficult to get it going, but you do have a lot of content.
Of course, there are always alternatives. I think the biggest selling point for wordpress for me was that it has a plugin, akismet, that helps to manage comment spam. If you haven't done a blog before, comment spam can be a huge problem. You'll likely need a few plugins to get what you want.
The resident wordpress guru on this forum is BJ.
Some possible alternatives to look at:
b2evolution
drupal
joomla
phpwebsite
So far as search engines, it depends on how you set it up. Most of these have a way to rewrite urls to be search friendly, if you're on apache with mod_rewrite enabled. I'm not sure about wordpress, but they do have seo plugins you can get.
I'm no expert but I've been researching this, too.

[circusplexus]

i agree with stabilpa. I've worked with both Drupal and Wordpress. They are both great tools that can speed development . But in terms of approach they are kind of the inverse of one another.

Wordrpess is primarily a blogging tool that can be made in to a more complete content management system with some work.

Drupal is a very complete CMS framework that has a blogging module built in to its core.

Out of the box, Wordpress is simpler, but Drupal is more powerful and flexible.

You really should define your functionality and then look at what you or your staff or perhaps an outside developer are comfortable with.

As for SEO, what search engines like is frequently updated content, properly structure web page and site architecture. You can achieve these with either tool if you take the time to build the infrastructure properly.

[Big Juice]

go for the wordpress if your site isn't too big. if your site is larger than a thousand pages then you might have better options going with joomla.

search engines love wordpress when the blog is hosted by wordpress but if you are going to host the software yourself then in order to get the same kind of love you will need to get all of your pinging set up right and, you will need to be adding content regularly.

[Orion]

I've started using wordpress more and more for clients static sites, it's soooo nice to give them a login show them where the manage/page is and let them do their own updates... And easy to build it so no one has a clue...
And when they want to start blogging it's just a simple job of adding the widget to the sidebar and voila.. insta blog built into their site.
The only downside is the time to search through all the wicked awesome plugins that are available to find all the functionality that could be of benefit to any one site...
Years ago I tried a few solutions, then just went back to building pure static sites... Started using wordpress about 2 years ago now and am hooked.. haven't even gone so far as trying joomla yet lol.... From what I can see Joomla is of definite benefit in larger sites.?? I've had no problems with wordpress up into 500+ paged sites so far.

my 2cents worth anyway... good luck on the decision!

[bj]

I like WordPress a lot, but it still feels sort of ... bloggy. :-/

It does look bloggy when it's on a free theme or one designed by someone who doesn't know their way around the templating system.

Of course, I've also seen that a lot of Drupal sites tend to look cookie cutter since the templating system is just a bit more rigid than what's possible with wordpress, unless you get under the hood and tweak the template.php and add custom template areas. In other words, someone who is good at templating can make a drupal installation look wonderful, just as someone who is good at templating can make wordpress jump through some amazing hoops. So the more important point becomes-- Is it the right tool for the job?

Is it true that once you start to get 10,000 hits per day WordPress gets bogged down?

That was true with versions before 2.5. One of the biggest advantages to the 2.5 upgrade was the optimizations made to the database calls, and the streamlining of all that code. The NY Times uses Wordpress and ponied up a pretty sizable dev donation to the project for this upgrade. I have a feeling they're getting a lot more than 10,000 unique visitors a day, so if they invested to make it work, I think it's safe for someone who gets 10,000 hits.

Drupal has always stood up to heavy traffic, and is indeed a fine tool, one I often use often for community sites which need a few more bells and whistles than are readily available in WordPress. It is confusing for most first time users though, whereas most people are up and running with WordPress in less than an hour. Joomla, though it has a fine community, and can get you up and running pretty quickly, suffers from some problems compared with others. Of course, no one's mentioned one of my favorites, ModX. Not as extensible yet, but it is for sure the one that is the most capable of being extended and can handle just about anything thrown at it. Once the new version gets out of beta I expect to see a lot of people who have been using the other systems mentioned jumping on the Modx Bandwagon.

[WebFadds]

Hello All -

New here -- thanks for the forum and interesting post on WordPress as a CMS solution. I'm partial to WordPress, since we build out websites on that platform for our clients. I have used Drupal, Joomla, Mambo (before Joomla), e107 and a couple of others in the past.

I agree that each solution offers particular strengths and weaknesses. However, I disagree that WordPress is "bloggy" anymore... we're on version 2.5 now, and major corporate sites are using it for their business mission... some without any blog in it at all. See examples in this article:
WordPress Wow

- Scott

[oimdiane]

If only we knew now way back when... I wish 10 years ago (roughly) when I started all the various websites we run that we'd opted for blogging them. Maybe they weren't that popular yet, but the blog format has certainly taken off. Blogs themselves appear quickly in the search engines, assuming you've got your tags, meta descriptions, post titles, etc., oriented to be picked up properly. Also the ability for your visitors to interact is a great thing - something not typically possible without the old fashioned "guest book" for html-driven sites.

My advice, for what it's worth, would be to leave your html alone and add the blog as a folder (or subdomain) and link access to your new blog on all your website pages.

This way you'll have the best of both worlds, need only update your html pages every now and then, quickly add pages and pages to your existing site as you make all your posts (and gain comments) which search engines love to see (a growing website), and get the interaction you're probably after from your visitors.

Hope this helps!

[BigDogDev]

On a site we did, we kept the site and added the blog. The blog allows for current events, quick updates, new information etc. Also, it gets our other new content indexed much faster.

The Blog gets lots of additional traffic via long-tail type searches.

Something to consider.

[Chuckmiser]

My advice, for what it's worth, would be to leave your html alone and add the blog as a folder (or subdomain) and link access to your new blog on all your website pages.

This way you'll have the best of both worlds, need only update your html pages every now and then, quickly add pages and pages to your existing site as you make all your posts (and gain comments) which search engines love to see (a growing website), and get the interaction you're probably after from your visitors.

Hope this helps![/quote]

I never put that together to put the blog links on all the old pages just like you would with the index.htm that would give you a instant links to get the ball rolling.

ya that helps allot, thank you for the epiphany!

[Bohak]

Thanks for all the very helpful advice. Its good to see this is still a forum where people can get non-biased advice on software, which I would not have been able to find on the FAQ pages of any of the blogware sites mentioned above. Im going to go ahead and try building part of our site in WordPress and see how it goes.
Muchos Gracios.

[bj]

Im going to go ahead and try building part of our site in WordPress and see how it goes.

If, for any reason, you find Wordpress not to your liking, Drupal does offer a Wordpress importer. However, I think it's tied to the Drupal 5 version. You can, once it's imported, then upgrade to Drupal 6.

It's possible that other full fledged CMS offer importers as well.

Good luck!