Ways to improve my website

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Hello there.

It would be great to make CERM (CERM Church Education Resource Ministries) a bigger website, but I know I have weaknesses in marketing, web/graphic design, and some other areas. If any of you has any ideas or even better skills in these areas and can assist I would be grateful. I always want the site to be more "academic" and for that I am sure to shut out the general christian populous but for the better. I have been to plenty of sites that are more popular, but have nothing but YouTube and multimedia eye candy all over the site. The articles were a mile wide but a inch deep and I do not want this. I value substance over popularity.

I have thought about Wordpress but the conversion would simply take too much time I could be using on research and writing of new content. Any other ideas?

Thanks..

John
 

vansmith

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As someone who privileges content over design, you really need to look into a prebaked solution like Wordpress (but not necessarily WP). Look into content management systems as well.

In essence, the key is to look into premade tools that will allow you to focus more on the content.
 
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As someone who privileges content over design, you really need to look into a prebaked solution like Wordpress (but not necessarily WP). Look into content management systems as well.

In essence, the key is to look into premade tools that will allow you to focus more on the content.

Do you have any names of these other solutions and the price tags? I do not nor can I afford much. I d not expect to get content advise here as that is for a theological form. And besides it all depends on what branch you come from. My site is heavily criticizes by factions of the Charismatic, WOF, liberal, feminist, seeker friendly, and other such groups. But my site has been heavily praised by many in the more conservative circles whom take the Word of God seriously.

Anyways this site is good for technical suggestions, so if you have any names of other solutions that are low in cost I would be grateful. Otherwise I will just need to settle as I am. There are other sites like mine (such as deception in the Church) that have had the same design for years.
 

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As Vansmith suggested, you should look to switching over to a CMS system that allows you to scale your site and re-design it without having to worry about content. The content would automatically render in different forms and fashion using the latest technologies like CSS and so on..

For starters, here is a list of CMS that you can look at. The vast majority of them are free to download and use. The work involved in two fold. 1) Moving your current content into whatever CMS you choose, and 2) creating the style/design to showcase your content. Most of these CMS' support themes that allow you to change/style things as you wish. Once again, there are many themes that are freely available and will serve as a good starting point and there are many paid/commercial themes that do a very nice job with showcasing content.

If you are not PHP/HTML/CSS inclined, then you can do the work of migrating content (most of these CMS' offer very useful WYSIWYG interfaces) and then explore options for the theme from doing it yourself (and learning) or hiring a web designer (there are too many too count) to do the work for you..
 
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Many Internet Service providers already have CMS systems you can install from there web interface, like WordPress or Joomla.

The cost to you should be nothing and a CMS based site will get the attention of Google more quickly than a more tradition site
 

vansmith

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Many Internet Service providers already have CMS systems you can install from there web interface, like WordPress or Joomla.
Good point. Using this also prevents one from having to do any of the configuration which will save one even more time.
 
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Many Internet Service providers already have CMS systems you can install from there web interface, like WordPress or Joomla.

The cost to you should be nothing and a CMS based site will get the attention of Google more quickly than a more tradition site

I am gonna contact them and check on this one. Thanks for the suggestion. I use HostGator.
 
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As Vansmith suggested, you should look to switching over to a CMS system that allows you to scale your site and re-design it without having to worry about content. The content would automatically render in different forms and fashion using the latest technologies like CSS and so on..

For starters, here is a list of CMS that you can look at. The vast majority of them are free to download and use. The work involved in two fold. 1) Moving your current content into whatever CMS you choose, and 2) creating the style/design to showcase your content. Most of these CMS' support themes that allow you to change/style things as you wish. Once again, there are many themes that are freely available and will serve as a good starting point and there are many paid/commercial themes that do a very nice job with showcasing content.

If you are not PHP/HTML/CSS inclined, then you can do the work of migrating content (most of these CMS' offer very useful WYSIWYG interfaces) and then explore options for the theme from doing it yourself (and learning) or hiring a web designer (there are too many too count) to do the work for you..

Thank you sir. No I am a dummy with HTML. I use Sea Monkey for most of my web design needs. Do you know what CMS Management template or whatever (I think hostgator has Word Press) would make the migration over to one easy? I think I tried doing this about a year ago and I had a rough time. For example I will explain.

Take this page

The Second Coming of Christ-A study of the Olivet Discourse

I tried doing a copy and paste into Word Press and none of the style copied over. The problem I had then was that I would need to RE-DO all style for every single page on my website!!!!!! Do you know of another solution I am not aware of? Thanks..
 
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Drupal or Word Press CMS website design

Just was talking with Hostgator support and we tried and tried to get a direct copy and paste from my sites HTML pages into both Word Press and Drupal and nothing worked.

For example take this page

The Second Coming of Christ-A study of the Olivet Discourse

Copy and paste into Word Press HTML source code or not is a nightmare. We when moved to Drupal which did a little better but not much. We installed a CK Editor module (Download | CKEditor) but it did not help much. Anyone know of a way to copy and paste my site into a CMS editor and have it directly copy over without me having to RE-DO all my pages? There has to be a solution out there.


Thanks..


John
 

RavingMac

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Post moved and merged. No need to start a new thread on the same topic.
 
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So now you are trying to switch from Drupal to Wordpress, am I correct ?

Well, why don't you ask your host to do that for you. Migrating data between CMS's is fairly simple when done at the server level. It's just a matter of running a single script and it's done.
Though I'd strongly advice you to maintain a latest copy of your website, content etc. over your local machine. It's just a precautionary measure just incase things don't work out the way you are expecting it to be, come-in really handy believe me.
 
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