The old Ideal Interface company website had been up for about 3 years and was looking a little dated. Not only was it out of date from a content perspective (as well as having our old London address & details, it contained references to an association with a parent company that has now folded) . On top of this, the CMS we had used required upgrading and given that the site was only a small, I thought a blogging platform was more suitable. Oh.... it also wasn't mobile compatible, which I see as a must in the current online world.
I therefore made the decision last week to redevelop the site, but this time using the Wordpress blogging platform.... The site's main purpose is to house a small amount of content based around our central proposition of eCommerce and Digital Marketing consulting, so I thought a blog was the ideal vehicle going forward. But here was the challenge I set myself...... get it done for no charge (except my time).
The first issue I had was exporting the content from our current content management system (Drupal) to our new one. Despite looking at several ways to do this automatically, I eventually settled for a 'copy and paste' approach. This actually turned out to be quite time efficient, given that Wordpress accepted most of the formatting from the old CMS.
The second one was migrating the domain across. You see the forwarding of our company email addresses is managed via one domain name provider, but migrating the DNS across meant losing this forwarding (which was not available in Wordpress as far as I could see).
Note: I only found out about the lack of forwarding by stopping the company email addresses for a period of a few hours. Luckily these were saved by our DNS ISP and eventually came through. Ooops!
The remedy to this issue was to give the website a subdomain and eventually I settled on http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk
However, Wordpress did charge me for the mapping of this subdomain, at a cost of about £9.
So now, we have a new site. One that has the same content, is updated using the Wordpress app on my iPhone and works incredibly well on mobile devices. I'm not 100% sure I like the template used on the PC version and I need to include the logo in there ASAP. But for just a very small outlay I can upgrade this template to a premium one or get one developed that I like.
Let's see how it fares.... especially as the domain has now changed and this may affect our SEO rankings.
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