Update on my project site
I’ve been working like a madwoman on the website I was going to use for my content management class project – the only thing is, I realized I needed to do way more work on it before converting it to WordPress. It was a legacy site, that lots of wonderful volunteer webmasters worked very hard on with what skills they had at the time – and boy have I been there. I should say, I’ve been THEM. I have left a few legacy sites in my wake as I’ve moved up from volunteer to free-lance semi-volunteer, and from learning by dabbling to actually taking classes, reading books and blogs and going to conferences. I know so much more now that I did when I was that volunteer webmaster muddling through, yet I realize now how VERY little I still know. I’m still dabbling, though much more effectively, at least.
Anyway, back to my “project” site – I’ve been going through all these old FrontPage generated pages and cleaning them up, separating content and style and behavior by adding stylesheets and javascript and php includes, making them all validate strict xhtml – it’s quite satisfying, actually. I’m also learning a ton by doing this. Like the joys of the .htaccess redirects – ha.
There is still much to be done, and as I’m doing it, I’m learning more about the site, the organization, and what the needs may be. It’s all good, but it wasn’t yet ripe for WordPress – or maybe I wasn’t. That, or another cms, Drupal? Joomla? Maybe even one I create, is definitely in the site’s future, but for now, I’m continuing to fiddle with it.
I just added an xml sitemap for Google and created a user sitemap. I really should work on the navigation – I’ve been working on the site’s architecture “under the hood” and now the menu needs to reflect that – it will be easy now that I have the navigation in a php include – only one page to edit!
The actual site is working pretty well now – the design is still pretty primitive, but I’ll work on prettying it up later 
Here it is – comments, feedback, ideas appreciated:
http://bristleconecnps.org/
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About
Maggie and Cricket
Hi, I’m Maggie Wolfe Riley. This is me and my dog, Cricket, on a hike near where I live in the beautiful Eastern Sierra. My husband and I are new homeowners in Bishop, California, and we love it here.
I’ve been studying web design through Cerro Coso Online, and this semester I’m taking PHP Site Management and Theme Design with Elaine Rudis Jackson, an awesome teacher. And I’m not just saying that because this blog is part of our grade!
This course will be an introduction to using Content Management Systems with websites, which will be very helpful for designing sites that clients can easily maintain. I’ll be posting about my learning process here.
Enhancements I’ve added so far (that I can remember):
valid xhtml strict pages
php includes – all pages are uniform now, and it’s easy to change the header, footer, navigation, etc by changing just one file.
Google analytics
Webmaster tools: Site Search
Google Calendar
rel=”external” for external links, and javascript to open them in a new window
javascript sortable table of plants sold at the annual native plant sales
Sitemap
Custom error pages
print css
contact form
set up google apps to handle our domain email
I know there is more, but that’s a start!
Maggie, I guess I’m a little unclear… is this a straight coded site with some php includes or a WordPress site?
FWIW, I found adding a site map to Google to be one of the simplest and most effective SEO tricks you can do for your site.
Straight coded with php includes – I felt like it was pushing it to go to WordPress so soon after taking over. I should have had a project site that wasn’t also a client site! I do hope to move it to WordPress, or maybe another cms, eventually – it’s probably too late to take an incomplete in the class? I will definitely be exploring all the things we covered in this class. I’ve been doing that anyway, just not in WordPress – working on security (using sftp/ssh instead of ftp, for example, changing users/passwords, .htaccess and robots.txt, etc), SEO (keywords, Sitemap.xml, 301 Redirects to keep pages current – I set up the 404 page to email me with each error, Google Analytics, etc), and lots more. I’ve been working on it all the time, but honestly, not for the class, for the client