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Create a WordPress Website (from an html website)
In 2013, I had several websites in html/css/javascript. The maintenance was starting to eat a lot of time from my hand, so I made the decission to change from HTML into a WordPress website. At that time the WordPress website had several advantages, like
- Easily editing a page
- Easiliy changing the menu
- Easily changing the looks of the Website
- The SEO becomes better and more reliable
- Easily adding contact forms or any other interactions
Making a WordPress website is very simple. In the video I will show this part and I also show how to copy my HTML website insite the new WordPress website. I will also show a local host named Xampp
The video is one of my first video’s and therefor not my best. This video recording for changing over can only be done once, so sorry for that. In the video it is a lot of copying, so don’t look if you want to make your own theme. It will not show in this video. Actually I still have to make a video serie about shortcodes, plugins, functions.php. It is on my wishlist, but somehow I am always doing something else.
In the video, I will start with the end product. In this way you will see that I used a different header photo and the links were put aside into a widget area. This is not necessary but there are many options and while changing to PHP it might be a good idea to change also the looks of a homepage.
XAMPP as a local host
In video, the use of XAMPP is recommended. There are more ways to install a server inside your home computer. But this is one of the simple ways I know. I use this home server because WordPress is made with PHP. This is a server side language, meaning that a offline server is needed to practice with WordPress.
After installing Xampp, Go to the control panel of Xampp and press start of the apache and Mysql. After starting both, open your browser and type localhost/xampp. The browser now will find the index file of Xampp. On this file you can read about security and that you should change two passwords.
To get the WordPress in your local server from Xampp is just downloading the zip file and extract it to a new folder under the htdocs of Xampp. The “name of new folder” will be your website on that localhost. To get access to the WordPress type: localhost/”name of new folder”
WordPress on the hosting server
The upload of WordPress into my server host is shown in the video. My server has this already installed, so it only takes two minutes to copy the WordPress to my domain. Also you can upload all the WordPress files via a FTP, but that will be more work.
After the testing in your home computer and the upload of the WordPress to the server it is just a lot of clicking and copying. This is shown in the video. In the end it is just the same as setting up a new WordPress site.
Change HTML home page into WordPress
The actual change from HTML into WordPress is nothing more than copying your CSS into the stylesheet of the chosen WordPress. And copying your HTML into the page.
The style sheet of the WordPress got some updates with my own CSS for phones. This is the most simple CSS as most DIVS are taken out. After a few days testing I almost deleted all the CSS and started with a clean site. For example, you don’t need anything for your pictures as you can position them with some on page styling with setting Margin as shown in following page.
From the HTML I took all the HTML like DIVS as they ere not mentioned in the CSS anyway.
Conclusion:
I changed my HTML homepage into a WordPress page. To get exactly the same looks it is best to find a WordPress site without much layout or with a layout which seems to use the same width as your own website. In this example I change the header photo and changed most of the navigation to the widget area. The end result is for me acceptable as websites should change overtime.