First major Project of 2009 Completed

I jumped at my first major goal or project for 2009 and completed it before the first week of the year was over. I had talked about this in one of my earlier posting already. I am running a couple of websites on a content management system that was no longer under support as the manufacturer went out of business. Things were good, but looking forward into the future I had to do something about and was looking for a migration to either Wordpress or Joomla.

Well, Wordpress won due the fact that I was able to a) import my content without going through too many issues and b) it allowed me to match the URL structure of the old CMS for each page. This was a biggie from a SEO perspective. I would have risked a major hit in search engine traffic and rankings and creating a new .htaccess with 301 redirects for almost 350 pages would have been a nightmare. I had initially planned on getting a custom Wordpress Theme designed, but the company I talked to wanted $2,000 + probably would have taken 7-10 weeks to complete the job. I declined and since I own a developers license for the Revolution Theme Wordpress templates I decided to do it myself and I think it turned out quite good. If you know the Revolution Themes for Wordpress you know that they are already very high in quality and I only had to make minor adjustments to layout and design to make it look pretty unique.

I started Thursday last week and put the finishing touch on almost everything Monday night at around 11 PM. There is a minor thing that I eventually will work on, but I am not sure yet. There is a small section of standalone html files hosting some flash tutorials. They do not match the overall colors and design – they did not do that before either due to the page layout. I am not sure yet if I keep them at all or if I just apply the basic header and color scheme and call it good. This is really minor and does not affect the overall site. The overall site has a 100% match on URL strings and post dates so that the site looks exactly the same for search engines. I also added a couple of SEO related plugins to better optimize the website for SEO. The website visitor enjoys a new layout and color scheme and I hopefully enjoy better revenue. I also completely removed Google Adsense from the website. Adsense Income in the past was low anyway and my revenue really comes from promoting affiliate products (web hosting / actual link to my site).

I started adding new content already, which will leverage the additional features Wordpress has to offer. I am especially excited about the site now pinging the search engines upon new content using the “Update Services” feature which pings sites like pingomatic or feedster. In a few weeks or a couple of months I will see if the additional SEO features are working out for the website.