The new Parenting My Teen website has been fully revealed and the Flip is complete!

Every page of content from the old HTML site has been pasted into the new Wordpress site (every article, every image, every link) and our site owner has taken some time to re-organize the articles into the most appropriate categories to keep the navigation from getting totally out of control.

We utilized the ‘widgets’ function of the Wordpress theme to organize her sidebars and make it easy to update changing content from week to week.

Finally, once the new site had been given approval by the owner, we went in and set up permanent redirects from the old HTML pages pointing to the new Wordpress pages.  (This ensures that current search traffic finds what it is looking for and not end up on a dead page.)

Quite a few moms have asked how Aurelia (Parenting My Teen’s Owner) signed up to have us flip her website and want to know how they can sign up to do the same.  Well, we approached her and asked if we could tackle her site as a training exercise. (I’m teaching my nephew, Gabe Devereaux, to do this for our local design firm, Freshnets.com.) Then asked if we could highlight the process here on Flip That Mom’s Website.  We’re thrilled that she agreed because the size and scope of her website made it a great learning opportunity.

To answer the question on how others can sign up to have us do this for free - well, you can’t.  (Sorry!) My nephew has to start earning an income if he is going to successfully stay home with the Quads so I can’t ask him to take on more work for free.  The good news is that our prices are very affordable.

Want to ‘flip’ your website into Wordpress?  Learn how Freshnets can help you do that. 

In our efforts to move Parenting My Teen from a static html website that was built in Microsoft Front Page to a database driven website built in Wordpress we had to consider how we would organize the huge amount of content already published on the existing site.

Wordpress provides you with two publishing options.  Posts and Pages.  Posts are managed by ‘categories’ and Pages are managed by ‘parent pages’.  Some Wordpress templates are set up to display all of the Pages on the side bar and this makes sense when you consider that most ‘blogs’ will usually have just a few pages like ‘About Us’ and ‘Privacy Policy’.    If you have a lot of pages, the sidebar gets messy.

Aurelia has a LOT of pages on her existing site.  She has a large ‘Parenting Articles’ section which has been broken down into over a dozen sub-categories.  Currently they are all listed on one page under sub-headings.

To make finding the content you want easier - and to make it easier to manage adding and updating content later, we wanted to kick things up a notch and create a more organized structure for all of these articles.  But how?

We learned that you can actually create individual page templates (as many as you like) so we created a specific page template for every sub-category of her article directory. Then we learned that you can add a bit of php to the page template to ask the blog to call up a list of ‘child pages’  so we edited that into each template page as well.

Now, we give the individual sub-category pages one parent page called ‘Parenting Articles’ and we have a three deep hierarchy that is easy to manage within the dashboard and which makes accessing the content a breeze for users.

(Is all that clear as mud?)

I know, until you see it come together step by step, it probably sounds confusing.

In any event, we’re well on our way.  The organizational structure is built and we’ve begun placing her content into the new Wordpress site.

It’s time for another “Flip That Mom’s Website” project!

Aurelia Williams has been hosting the Parenting My Teen Podcast for over two years now.  Her web traffic and listenership has grown consistently and she is enthusiastic about the future. 

The Parenting My Teen site was originally designed in Microsoft FrontPage.  There’s nothing wrong with the design, but in order to outsource web work to a Virtual Assistant she has to make sure that the VA has FP installed on her own system.   That isn’t a huge hurdle for most VA’s to overcome but since Microsoft is no longer selling FP, it does present a challenge for newcomers. And it just so happens that Aurelia enjoys giving work to newbies.

A potential solution presented was to switch her website over to a web based content management system, Wordpress to be specific.  With Wordpress, the entire site’s content can be managed, changed, added to or deleted by anyone with web access.

Aside from the usability advantages, having your site built in Wordpress means that every page can be used to invite interaction with visitors. 

Deciding it was a great idea, Aurelia signed up to be the next Flip That Mom’s Website ‘Flippee‘.

The first step was for Aurelia to select a Wordpress Theme that most closely resembles what she wants her finished redesign to look like.    She has chosen the Prosumer theme.

The next step was for our design team to step in and chat with Aurelia about her needs for the new site.

The existing PMT site is quite extensive with a lot of articles and information.  All of this content has to be added to the new Wordpress site.  Organizing the content will be challenging.

We’ll be back in a few days to let know how what we’ve accomplished so far.