Moving from a FrontPage website into WordPress?

  • Unknown's avatar
    hisnibs · Member ·

    My website, http://www.hisnibs.com, is from last century! As a one-person business, I created the site using FrontPage and still update it that way. I realize that the software is a dinosaur, but it’s worked. This antiquated system no longer works for me and I have the following questions (I’m *totally* new to WordPress).

    1. I want to have my website locally, on my on PC, for security reasons — and not just on a host. Is this possible with WP?

    2. I keep seeing mentions of WP blogs here. Is hosting of websites also possible?

    3. Is there any way to import my website into WP, or would I have to start from scratch?

    4. One thing I’ve never found the time to do is to integrate a shopping cart into my site (I know, I know!). Easy or hard to do — as I have hundreds of separate products (fountain pens primarily).

    5. Am I better off looking for replacement software for FrontPage (and if so, what would be recommended) and continue to host my site at Web.com?

    I’ve continually put off addressing these issues — along with creating a website geared for mobile — due to the press of time. As a one-person company — who wears all hats — am I foolish to think that I can do this myself? If so, are there people/resources that would take on a project like this without costing me my firstborn?

    Thanks much to one and all for any guidance that you can provide!

    Regards,

    Norman

  • Unknown's avatar
    sandymcfadden · Member ·

    Hi hisnibs,

    WordPress can be a great solution for almost any site. That being said WordPress.com might not be your best option. I’ll try to answer your questions.

    1. You would not really be able to keep a copy of your site locally with WordPress.com. You could regularly run exports of your content and save that to your computer, but it’s not nearly the same as what I believe you mean.

    2. You can use WordPress.com to create a blog or a “website” made up of individual pages.

    3. No matter what option you go I would say you are going to be manually inputting your information from your old site into the new one.

    4. With WordPress.com you could sign up for a business account and have access to shopping carts. I believe it starts at $299 / year. http://store.wordpress.com/plans/business/

    5. I still think WordPress as software can do what you are looking for an makes a great option for almost any website.

    My suggestion would be to setup a self hosted version of WordPress from http://wordpress.org. I’m sure you could likely continue hosting with Web.com and have them host the WordPress site for you.

    Here is some info about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

    Basically with WordPress.org you are hosting it so you have more control. There are many plugins available which you can add, including ecommerce ones.
    You can also setup a copy on your local computer, although it is different than how you would do it now with frontpage.

    For more info about self hosting you can check out the http://wordpress.org site and their support forums http://wordpress.org/support

    It certainly is something you could do by yourself as a one person business. It would require some up front time investment, but I believe the easy of maintaining your site would be worth it.

    Hope that helps.

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