Major Upgrade Underway For SBSN

For a web site that’s been online since 1997, you’d expect there to have been quite a few changes over the years. Surprisingly, there hasn’t really been the need to make that many changes… until now.

While fresh content has always been added — most of it “automatically” in the form of member listings and articles — the last revision to the design of the Small Business Network web site was way back in 2001. And while that design has worked reasonably well for the past seven years (I’m STILL shaking my head in disbelief at that!) I recently decided it was time to undertake a significant revision of the site.

There are several reasons why this is happening…

Mainly, technology has changed — quite significantly — and as I’m now extensively using WordPress as my CMS (Content Management System) on all my “new” sites, I had planned to “revisit” my more established HTML based sites and give them a well deserved makeover. And having WordPress as a CMS makes a BIG difference to your ability to maintain a web site much more efficiently and effectively.

And as WordPress comes with built-in Web 2.0 features, it makes the information available here far more useful and more readily accessible to both site visitors AND search engines.

Speaking of search engines… SBSN has had a “love/hate” relationship with Google over the years. I say that because (for some totally baffling reason I still can’t determine) it seems to do a monthly “dance” with Google… One month there might only be 3000 visitors coming from Google, and a few months later it could be 60,000… and then back down again.

I feel that WordPress will help Google “understand” this site a little better, and I might begin to see more than 50% of my 5000+ pages actually appearing in Google one day, with the corresponding increase in traffic and hopefully a return to much better Adsense returns as well.

All the existing (and future) articles on the site will be based in WordPress. The existing “directory” section of member web site listings will get a matching facelift so it “looks” like belongs, even though it remains driven by cgi backend programming. I certainly didn’t want to work out how to convert all of that over to WordPress!

The final step will be to do quite a few 301 redirects in the .htaccess file so that the search engines and my visitors will be redirected from old pages to the corresponding “new” page.

I expect the whole conversion process will take a couple of weeks to complete, and should be well worth the effort to bring the site into the 21st Century