Worry about changing from HTML (SBI!) to Wordpress

[neilward2]

Hi friends,

I've been using SBI! (Site Build It) for the past 2 years to build up my website (I use a HTML layout, not a crappy template) but I've now realised that I need to leave SBI and upgrade to Wordpress...

Why? I'm losing a lot of customers to other dating training companies and a few clients I've spoken to said my design is outdated, and they preferred the other company better as their site looked more professional.

This is my concern: As SBI is a site builder, I have no idea what will happen to all my HTML pages and images once I leave SBI.
2nd: How can I install Wordpress on my site as the URL, not URL/wordpress without wiping all the data? I mean, I understand that I will have to build all the pages again, but I don't know the best way to go about doing this?

I really appreciate any advice that anyone can give me, and I will of course return the favour in any way I can. I'm a coach specialising in dating and transforming people's lives so I am always wanting to help people, either through this forum or any other means.

Thanks again,

[Brutha]

I'm not sure whether SBI is really your problem.

Look at your front site:
"FREE Dating Course & eBook

($100-00 Value)"

Your websites looks like it's optimized for getting as many email addresses as possible instead of being optimized for looking professional.

Your webpage seems to have 15+ different text styles. It's too noisy.

I have no idea why you have a red background behind "We respect your email privacy"-
I think it would look better if the yellow behind "FREE Dating Course & eBook" and the red/orange of the email submission would be blue. Which blue? The blue of the ebook.

Your background has a pattern. Why? It's not supposed to draw attention. You want that you user focus on the actual content. How about having a blank white background in it's place.

Why is there a " above the advertisement for the Ultimate Man Conference?

There are a bunch of things that make the page look unprofessional. Switching the underlying technology won't be enough the page look professional.

The best approach might be to hire a good webdesigner and tell him that you want a wordpress page with the content of your present page that looks professional but still converts decently.

[neilward2]

Thank you for your reply, I agree with you, the site doesn't look professional - that's the whole point to my post. This is the reason for going across to a professional Wordpress template where I don't have to worry about manually maintaining the layout, fonts, designs, etc - it's too time consuming and had work.

The site is designed for email capture, but it didn't work too well. This is why I am now going for the 'professional coaching service model' as opposed to the 'products to buy model'

My question was this: how can I install Wordpress onto the main URL without wiping the data?

This is too important to risk chatting with a random designer about, I need to speak with someone who has done this before. My site has well over 100 pages of content, if not closer to 150 pages... I need to be sure I won't lose all my data when I install Wordpress.

Thanks,

[pianoperformer]

As someone else has said, SBI is not your problem. In fact, leaving SBI might be even worse than what you have right now. My own site is with SBI and it was the best decision I could have made. Two and a half months later, it is getting 700 visits per day.

SBI has plenty of professional templates; why not choose one of those and modify it as you desire?

If you decide to leave anyway, they will give you the HTML but there is no easy way of importing it into a Wordpress blog.

I've been working with SBI for a while now and have fully taken advantage of many of their features, so let me know if you would like help with using it to its fullest.

[neilward2]

Originally Posted by pianoperformer

As someone else has said, SBI is not your problem. In fact, leaving SBI might be even worse than what you have right now. My own site is with SBI and it was the best decision I could have made. Two and a half months later, it is getting 700 visits per day.

SBI has plenty of professional templates; why not choose one of those and modify it as you desire?

If you decide to leave anyway, they will give you the HTML but there is no easy way of importing it into a Wordpress blog.

I've been working with SBI for a while now and have fully taken advantage of many of their features, so let me know if you would like help with using it to its fullest.

Thank you, I appreciate your response.

700 visitors per day is very impressive - I am sitting at 400 per day, the issue is this, less than 1% are converting so it's pointless for me to continue with this model. I understand that most SBIers have the same problem and this is because of the way the site layout is set up, getting over 5% of your visitors to opt in is extremely difficult when they have the option to look at your information for FREE with no catch.

I have spoken to 100's of SBIers over the years and only a handful are making over $3K per month from their site, in fact only 7 people come to mind. If you are making this amount then I take my hat off to you, you are doing very well. But I unfortunately am not making this amount from my site. I have to rely on my off site marketing and advertising to make over £3K per month. My site brings me very little in terms of $$$

I think that the SBI model is great but is terrible when it comes to design, they are WELL behind the curve, the templates are very 1995 in my opinion. I have spoken to a coupple of web professionals who tell me that a Wordpress professional template is the way that I need to go if I want to compete with the likes of PUAtraining.com and daygame.com - as their site designs just blows mine out of the water. 2 and 3 column designs are not good converters in my opinion.

But to answer my own question, I think I'm going to have to back up all of my HTML pages and graphics and then start again from scratch when I install Wordpress to my site. Basically, I will have to copy the content from the HTML and paste it into a new page on Wordpress. Time consuming but worth it in the long run I think if I want to establish myself as a 'global' professional dating training company.

What do you think guys?

Thanks again,

[Brutha]

At the beginning you don't have to redirect the url.

Get webspace and install wordpress on the webspace. When wordpress runs to your satisfaction on the new webspace and has your content you redirect the url.

Depending on how much links you have to actual content it would also make sense to keep the links intact. There probably some wordpress plugin that will help you but I don't know the details.

My site has well over 100 pages of content, if not closer to 150 pages... I need to be sure I won't lose all my data when I install Wordpress.

Not having backups of your data is a problem in it's own.

This is the reason for going across to a professional Wordpress template where I don't have to worry about manually maintaining the layout, fonts, designs, etc - it's too time consuming and had work.

I don't think that true. Using a professional template won't absolve you from making design decisions.

Your ebook would still look the same way and might not fit into the design of the template.
Your logo will still look the way it does at the moment.

[pianoperformer]

Originally Posted by neilward2

Thank you, I appreciate your response.

700 visitors per day is very impressive - I am sitting at 400 per day, the issue is this, less than 1% are converting so it's pointless for me to continue with this model. I understand that most SBIers have the same problem and this is because of the way the site layout is set up, getting over 5% of your visitors to opt in is extremely difficult when they have the option to look at your information for FREE with no catch.

I have spoken to 100's of SBIers over the years and only a handful are making over $3K per month from their site, in fact only 7 people come to mind. If you are making this amount then I take my hat off to you, you are doing very well. But I unfortunately am not making this amount from my site. I have to rely on my off site marketing and advertising to make over £3K per month. My site brings me very little in terms of $$$

Again, my site has only been around for 2.5 months, so no I'm not making $3,000, but this month my site has made around $550-600. This includes revenue from my online store (over $200), revenue from my online training programs (over $250), and ad revenue (over $100).

Regarding the SBI model: I think it is ingenious, personally. The trick, again, is in a good balance between free and paid models. You don't want to give too much free content, or, yes, they won't have any need to pay. But can you really say that it is the fault of free content that people aren't making money? You're on the site of someone who has been blogging for years, and nearly all of his content is free, besides of course his book. Then there's Erin, who also has tons of free content, besides a few ebooks. Both of them attract people because of their free content, and get them to pay for things like: consulting, workshops, books, affiliate products, psychic readings, etc.

I am no shill for SBI, but I've seen their model work really well in my own case, bringing a site with barely any visitors and next to no revenue, to what it is now in under three months, and it is continuing to grow. It was important to me that my site could grow to support me and my soon-to-be wife, because that is my dream to do this.

I've read Ken's ebooks, and he is not your average internet marketer. I've found myself wowed on several occasions, which is not usual for someone who has been around the internet scene for so long, especially dealing with technical matters, managing servers, etc. The way I write and communicate to my visitors has completely changed, and many more people have stuck around as a result.

Originally Posted by neilward2

I think that the SBI model is great but is terrible when it comes to design, they are WELL behind the curve, the templates are very 1995 in my opinion. I have spoken to a coupple of web professionals who tell me that a Wordpress professional template is the way that I need to go if I want to compete with the likes of PUAtraining.com and daygame.com - as their site designs just blows mine out of the water. 2 and 3 column designs are not good converters in my opinion.

They may or may not be. The templates I have seen are fully CSS driven and up-to-date with HTML standards, anyway. My own site uses one of their templates directly, and I've not gotten any complaints.

I don't think your design matters so much. I should not get in the way, which it sounds like yours is right now, but as long as it is not terribly cumbersome to deal with, it should work just fine. What matters most of all is placement, and what you want your visitor to see, when.

Again, I think you see the problem, but you place the blame where it does not belong. Perhaps it is your design as some here have pointed out. Perhaps it is your writing style. Perhaps it is the overall infrastructure of your site—where you place each page and how you link to it. All of these things are so important, and I'd consider those before dropping the backend infrastructure, which is the only thing that might help you here.

You have the visitors. So, the only problem is converting them to revenue. SBI isn't going to prevent you from doing that. If you don't like the templates, modify them, or pay someone to do it for you. If you aren't willing to do either of those, Wordpress isn't going to help you any more. A site takes work, and often times a minimum of financial investment to get right.

Originally Posted by neilward2

But to answer my own question, I think I'm going to have to back up all of my HTML pages and graphics and then start again from scratch when I install Wordpress to my site. Basically, I will have to copy the content from the HTML and paste it into a new page on Wordpress. Time consuming but worth it in the long run I think if I want to establish myself as a 'global' professional dating training company.

What do you think guys?

Thanks again,

I've given you my opinion. I think that this would only give you more ways to fail. SBI often works as a failsafe, showing you where things are going wrong. You are taking those things and blaming it on SBI, but truly Wordpress isn't going to help you any more, if you can't do the work yourself. We're only talking of backend systems, and Wordpress just gives you a way to post pages. There's nothing about it that will make your business succeed.

[Tarzansjane]

Hi Neil

Here's a thought, and don't know if it would work.

Why don't you keep your SBI site, crank up your traffic and use Infin It! to work in your upgrade? SBI will be the traffic generating shell and at the core you will have the other.

I know you can upgrade the SBI L and F any way you want. But if you need technical beyond SBI capabilities, then use Infin It. That's what it's for.

Also, I know SiteSell concentrates its efforts on what will help the majority of it's customers. It does't venture out technically (php, etc.), because most of it's users would use that.

But if you exceed what SBI does, you can plug in your own 3rd party solutions, quite nicely.

Good luck to you!

PS Also, what a shame it would be to go through all that work transferring your site, only to find your conversions don't improve.

[ButterflyWoman]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Get webspace and install wordpress on the webspace. When wordpress runs to your satisfaction on the new webspace and has your content you redirect the url.

However, you'll have to manually edit the wp-config file prior to switching, so make sure you're familiar with the way it's set up. You'll need to manually put in the new URLs, and, I'm pretty sure, you'll need to edit the database to change URLs there, as well (that's fairly straightforward with phpMyAdmin; just search for terms and replace).

Essentially, the "built it elsewhere and then redirect via DNS" route is pretty much the only way to do this at all gracefully, in my experience.

[Rebecca800]

Hi Neil

There are ways to have a professional looking template with SBI since you have already gone down the custom HTML route. So I definitely feel you can address this issue without going through the stress of transitioning 150 pages one-by-one to WordPress (not to mention manually converting other features like all your user-generated Content 2.0 pages). For example, you can hire a designer who specializes in custom SBI templates, as this is what I did with my site: How To Create a Custom Site Build It (SBI) Template

I'd also add that SBI is expert in helping people create profitable online businesses and if your site isn't achieving its goals I'd seriously look to stay with SBI and use their tools and education to figure out exactly where you're going wrong. Switching to WordPress will only create more issues in the short term (I'm pretty sure you will have to upload all your pages again from scratch) and in the long term you wont have any additional insight in terms of making your business profitable.

It's your decision of course but IMO your focus now should be on enhancing the existing content, design and layout - all which is definitely doable with SBI - rather than spending hours upon hours re-uploading existing content for the sake of switching to a new platform....

[Curtis2011]

Hey Neil.

I am going to say what others are saying, that you don't need WordPress for your site to look professional.

The only thing that WordPress itself brings to the table is the ability to post content slightly easier by writing in your browser as a blog post, then clicking a button. However, since you are already experienced with writing your own html content, this probably wouldn't be worth changing over to WordPress for all by itself.

The good news is that SBI is fully capable of hosting any professional static web design that you want it to host. Instead of using blogging software to make your website, you could still use SBI and simply change over to a better template. One example of this would be Official Double Your Dating | David DeAngelo's Double Your Dating, a huge player in the dating niche. Their whole template or one similar to it would be 100% capable of being hosted on SBI.

If you are really serious about getting a professional design, my advice would be to go to Logo Design, Web Design and More. Design Done Differently | 99designs.com and pay for their design contest process. Choose a winning design then go to Elance.com or a similar site (or even 99designs.com, not sure what their prices are for website coding though) and hire a web designer to build the page in HTML for you.

IMO this would be much easier than switching your whole site to WordPress.

[Artelus]

Originally Posted by neilward2

Hi friends,

I've been using SBI! (Site Build It) for the past 2 years to build up my website (I use a HTML layout, not a crappy template) but I've now realised that I need to leave SBI and upgrade to Wordpress...

Why? I'm losing a lot of customers to other dating training companies and a few clients I've spoken to said my design is outdated, and they preferred the other company better as their site looked more professional.

This is my concern: As SBI is a site builder, I have no idea what will happen to all my HTML pages and images once I leave SBI.
2nd: How can I install Wordpress on my site as the URL, not URL/wordpress without wiping all the data? I mean, I understand that I will have to build all the pages again, but I don't know the best way to go about doing this?

I really appreciate any advice that anyone can give me, and I will of course return the favour in any way I can. I'm a coach specialising in dating and transforming people's lives so I am always wanting to help people, either through this forum or any other means.

Thanks again,

I don't think there is a way to "convert" SBI to Wordpress and save your data. You will have to copy and paste all your articles into your wordpress installation as pages or blogs.

Wordpress won't make your website look better. Wordpress just offers a simple way to change "templates" that you install. Building your own Wordpress template, however, is much more difficult than editing your HTML theme to make it look more professional.

[James81]

I haven't been able to really get into your website and look at how many pages you have (how many DO you have?), but I thought I would throw out the offer that I could do this for you (transfer all your stuff from SBI to Wordpress).

Of course, since I'm a starving college student who is about to run out of funds soon, I can't do it for free. But depending on how many pages you have and what you want done, we could work out some kind of deal.

Just PM me and let me know (also, let me know what YOU think is a fair price for doing it) and we can work from there.

I don't have any tricks for doing it aside from copy/pasting the stuff over to wordpress.

[James81]

Also, forget about the naysayers above ^.

Converting from SBI to Wordpress will most likely be the smartest move you can make because it's going to give you a boatload of more tools and flexibility to work with, and it's about 8000 times less clunky than SBI.

[GraemeMcA]

Hi Neil

From what I can gather this isn't so much a personal website as a bread and butter business to you. That being the case my first recommendation is to go with Drupal rather then wordpress. It may be a little more time-consuming to setup and you may need a techie's help but Drupal has an immense tool-set for:

• Customer Management
• Newsletter Creation/ Mailing List management
• Data Backups
• Payment System Integration
• Privilege Levels (Maybe not an immediate concern but if you ever want to outsource authoring...)

Wordpress is first and foremost a bloging tool but if you've reached a point where you need to expand your operation it may not be for you. There are other tools apart from Drupal though but I've found it to be quite useful. It's also free and scalable so it should be a while before you find yourself at a system crossroads.

All the best

G

[neilward2]

Originally Posted by Artelus

Wordpress won't make your website look better. Wordpress just offers a simple way to change "templates" that you install. Building your own Wordpress template, however, is much more difficult than editing your HTML theme to make it look more professional.

I completely disagree, purely based on the other Wordpress sites that I own. It was really easy to set up and the design is IMO 2nd to none!

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

Here are the benefits I can see:
1. Easily add membership software - which I can't do ATM with SBI.
2. Easily add plugins that I can't use with SBI
3. Easily add forum software - which is tricky with SBI

But most importantly is the design and layout so that I can show people exactly what they need to do when they land on my site: eg. step 1 - read this FREE course, step 2. Watch the video series, step 3. Join the forum, step 4. get coaching.

This is the nearest template to what I want that I could find:

cms.template-help.com/wordpress_32936/?page_id=6

Then of course there are the 4 boxes directly underneath which will have 1. Products. 2. My membership site (coaching academy) 3. Coaching services and 4. My weekend intensive bootcamp.

I'm pretty confident that this is the best way to go about this, I've also just built a global coaching brand too which branches into all areas of coaching so this template can just be copied across with the branding to my 7 new URLs.

And yes James, I'm interested in talking to you about this, I'll send you a PM.

I think I'm just no longer interested in using SBI - I don't use any of the tools anymore, I just think they are really outdated and as for the designs - they are terrible! I was reading an article on 2 and 3 column sites and it said that WP sites convert at 6X more on average... TBH, I think I've just outgrown SBI, it was a great way to learn but I don't see the point in staying with them now. My content is done, I'm happy with the results so now I want to just concentrate on promoting the site both offline and online. Plus all the other guys that make BIG money in my niche, use WP - just today, I was talking with a friend in the USA and he was showing me what his WP plugins can do - I was literally blown away!

Thanks,

[ButterflyWoman]

Originally Posted by neilward2

I was literally blown away!

Literally? Something like this, you mean?

[Artelus]

Originally Posted by neilward2

I completely disagree, purely based on the other Wordpress sites that I own. It was really easy to set up and the design is IMO 2nd to none!

Okay I'm going to assume that not only do you not know PHP/MySQL, but you do not know HTML/CSS either. That being the case, then yeah; you have a much prettier variety of wordpress themes to choose than html themes, because Wordpress is simply more popular.

The point I was trying to make is that if you want a custom looking website, it would be easier to code your own theme in simple HTML/CSS rather than your own Wordpress theme. But you could always hire a web designer to do it for you.

3. Easily add forum software - which is tricky with SBI

I would heavily recommend against using a forum plugin for Wordpress. The reason: they suck. Instead, use a separate forum on your website. Use PHPBB3 or SMF or you can even purchase vBulletin. Steve Pavlina uses Wordpress for his blog, but this forum is vBulletin, not some cheap wordpress plugin like bbPress. If it is noone will be using it.

SBI is outdated and old school, but switching to Wordpress won't fix everything. I would recommend switching to Wordpress just to future proof your site, but don't expect much...