Rapidweaver vs. Wordpress


I'm seriously considering re-doing our website and getting away from Rapidweaver. If I had to do it all over again, I'd set up a Wordpress site and be done with it.

Now, converting 40 pages of stuff, plus 60-something blogs, would be a monumental pain in the ass, but the upside would be more flexibility down the road.

Here's the current site

http://sourcetosea.net

but I want something with tabs, a photo header, and more web 2.0 touchy-feeliness, something like this.

http://wpthemeshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/zigzag3.jpg

I've got to be able to start blogging remotely as well. I know about Rapidblogr, but that just seems like one more thing to buy and kludge together. Anybody got any ideas one way or the other?

10/14/2007 5:17:36 PM

I've heard movable type is good, too, and a lot of big sites use it for their CMS

The Washington Post runs off of movable type

10/14/2007 5:31:18 PM

use wordpress.

moveable type is great for large scale sites, but its extreme overkill for a personal blog.

10/14/2007 6:47:28 PM

I'm leaning toward Wordpress, although it is going to be a PIA to move everything over. I do like the free plug-ins that are available though.

One thing - how much of a hit am I going to take on Google if I do a shitload of 301 redirects? Rapidweaver has a goofy architecture in the way that it names webpages (basically, you have to go one level deeper than you normally would) so I'm not going to be able to just create a duplicate page on WP and copy the URL. To be honest, this only really affects the 10-15 pages that ever drive traffic anyway, but I don't want to lose what little Google-fu that I have. A few of those pages are on Google's top 10 for their related category (mostly related to the thru-hiking stuff)

Jesus this is going to be a PIA, but probably necessary in the grand scheme of things. I have a book coming out this spring, and I've got about 50 blog articles in the hopper to release consistently over the next couple of months to hopefully help get some buzz going. I've also got about 1,200 people on my mailing list that I'm trying not to confuse.

Good thing work has been slow lately

[Edited on October 14, 2007 at 7:14 PM. Reason : .]

10/14/2007 7:11:57 PM

you dont have to go a level deep with wordpress. and you should be able to use apache's mod_rewrite to redirect those high traffic pages without needing 301's

10/14/2007 10:37:58 PM

I've got wordpress running on mine, nice since its quick to install

10/14/2007 10:53:12 PM