Switching a client to Wordpress
I’m working with a client who has a brochure-type website to which he periodically posts articles. This website was created several years ago, nominally in ASP, but the site consists of mostly static content, with one lonely contact form.
The client is looking for a few changes: he wants to strongly encourage visitors to provide him with their email address before reading articles on the site. To this end, he wants to present users with a squeeze page when they visit an article: they will be asked to provide their email address, but can opt-out of this and proceed to the article.
Additionally, he is publishing a book and wants to include links in the text to up-to-date content on his website content. He wants these links to look good, like http://www.example.com/book/guitar-manufacturers-in-england, for example.
This seems to be a client who would be better suited with Wordpress than with his current system. He’s publishing periodic articles, and he has some business services to sell, so he needs brochure-type pages.
Wordpress can easily support these needs. It offers blog posts, which would suit the articles, and pages, which would suit the non-chronological content. It would be easy to reimplement his template in wordpress’s templating system. There are plugins to do most of the work for the email collection system, and the squeeze page could be integrated. The pretty links for the book could be supported directly and easily if running on Apache, and with a bit more difficulty under IIS.
Then there’s the question of platforms, and switching away from the all-Microsoft solution. Wordpress works only with MySQL and requires PHP. It’s much better to run it under Apache, and it doesn’t matter if the OS is Windows or Linux.
The advantages of Wordpress are that it is easy for the client to post articles and SEO-type functionality is vastly improved – blog feeds are built in, and plug and play plugins are available for generating google sitemaps and integration with google analytics. The implementation would have to setup 301 permanent redirects for the current .asp pages, which would impose no additional burden beyond that imposed by implementing the pretty links for the book.
This would be an upsell, but it would perhaps give the client functionality they’ve been wanting, and would make many future improvements cheaper, in some cases trivially cheap.
