To move a SiteSell website to a new platform takes plenty of planning and preparation.
The overview is:
- Planning New Site
- Do a proper shrewdies site plan.
- Prepare Old Site
- Change or disable features proprietary features that will not convert. There are alternatives for all the proprietary services of SiteSell. I’ll cover specifics in detail later – if you are stuck on something, add your problem below and I’ll answer it immediately (probably at shrewdies.net). The newsletter can be a problem if you have lots of subscribers (I had 2500 when I started moving and 2700 by the time of the big switch)
- Prepare New Site
- Develop layout and categories. Prepare new navigation and explanatory pages to create a framework to accept old pages.
- Transfer Site
- Copy all files to your new platform as static HTML files.
- Convert Formats
- Change old static pages to new dynamic posts and pages. Often, this means a complete rewrite, and redirect.
- Add new content
- Now you are free of the shackles of that dodgy editor, get cracking on new content.
Preparing your old SBI site is usually the biggest chore if you have used lots of their proprietary features like voting forms. If you haven’t got much traffic it is tempting to just scrap the lot and start again, salvaging your best content and using redirects to keep the search engine traffic.
I have plenty of traffic, so I have to make the changes. Hard work, but acheivable if you follow a step-by-step approach.
