I mentioned in one of my other blog posts that I was making some major changes to my websites. I have just completed the biggest revamp at my Illinois real estate website. I had earlier revamped my local Batavia real estate website and was using that as a test bed to see what it would do to my search engine rankings. After a couple weeks I had absolutely no change to my rankings for Batavia so I decided to go forward with my primary web portal www.illinoislandandhomes.com. I have been having some SERP fluctuations on my main site so I felt it was a good time to go ahead and make the change.
Perhaps the biggest change is switching over from HTML to PHP. I really have been struggling with updates as my site grows. Because I was doing everything by hand in HTML everytime I had to modify my theme or link structure or footer or whatever, I had to modify 120 pages. As you can guess, even little changes became a big project and all my time was getting sucked away.
I started looking for a content management system (CMS) for my site so I can easily make changes and have them filter through to all my pages. I also wanted something built on either PHP or ASP so I can make use of database-driven dynamic content. I looked at Joomla and Drupal but neither one seemed very good at integrating blogs and a static site. What I eventually went with is a site built on a wordpress platform but as a static website with a blog incorporated.
I found a theme I liked and spent a long time making modifications - pretty much eveything has been tricked out and custom-modified. Then over the past week, I've been transferring my static HTML pages into the wordpress template. This was pretty easy because my code was fairly simplistic. My biggest challenge was dealing with .htaccess rewrites so that when I switched my site on, the links that I previsouly built to my internal pages would still be able to find them. I also went and changed my permalink structure on my blog (another nightmare) from a structure of www.illinoislandandhomes.com/blog/CATEGORY/postslug to www.illinoislandandhomes.com/postslug. I did this for a couple reasons. First, the way it was, my posts were getting buried 3 levels deep in subfolders and this isn't ideal for SEO. Second, I am going to be integrating IDX on my blog so those IDX pages would be anywhere from 4-6 subfolders deep - not good. Plus it looks nice and clean to have my blog posts originate from my domain.
In any case, I'm mostly finished and am now cleaning up my code a bit and doing test runs on my various features. I'm pretty excited about it and think it looks very professional. And the best part was, I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for someone to do pretty much the same thing.
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