In From Website to Blog, Part 1 we looked at the reasons for and against transforming a website into a blog. Only you can weigh the options and decide if such a transformation is right for you. But let's assume we want to proceed. How do we get started?
Back It Up!
This should be obvious, but it always bears repeating. The first thing you should do is backup your current site. This shouldn't be a problem for most of us, as we tend to work with an offline version of the site that gets copied up to the web host whenever changes are made. But it's not uncommon for little things here and there to slip by the staging process and make it directly onto the site. I've done this before with copies of files that I've offered for download, etc. Don't rely on the local copy of your site. The best thing to do is to fire up your FTP program (if you want a free one, try FileZilla, I use it all the time and it works great) and do a recursive copy of the entire content of your current website. Usually this involves nothing more than dragging a folder over from the “remote” side of the FTP window to the “local” side and waiting a few minutes for the entire source tree to copy itself down to your hard disk. (Really, you should be doing this on a regular basis no matter what.)
Build a Sitemap
Now that you have a copy of the site stashed away for safekeeping, it's time to build a sitemap for your old site.
The term “sitemap” can refer to many different things, but all we're looking for is a complete list of the pages on your site. Let's take my debt-free living site as an example. Its sitemap is:
- www.nodebtisgood.com
- www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/about.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/privacy-policy.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/sitemap.html
It's very important to have a complete sitemap of your site. You don't want to lose any incoming links to those pages, no matter how trivial they are. And chances are good that the page structure of your new blog will not exactly the page structure of your existing site.
Take the file extensions, for example. On a website most pages end with “.html”, “.htm”, or “.php”. Even if you keep everything else about the URL the same, those extensions are probably going to be dropped. The www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips.html is going to become www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips/ when I move it over to WordPress. Not only have I lost the “.html” extension, but technically the URL also ends with a slash (“/”) where before it didn't.
In most cases, then, you're going to have to redirect pages from their old locations to their new locations and use the right kind of redirection (a 301 redirection) to ensure that you don't lose visitors and that the search engines understand that your content has moved to a new set of addresses.
The only way to do this is to start with a complete list of the existing URLs. Build it anyway you like. If you already have a Google Sitemaps file, for example, that's probably all you need. But even a simple text file listing each unique URL will do.
Next we'll talk about keeping the old site alive while the new site is being developed.
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.