Blogs have advantages.

I recently made a post about switching one of my sites to WordPress from a static site.

If you are not sure if you want a blog or a static site, maybe some of these advantages might change your mind. While I am most familiar with WordPress, other platforms like TypePad and Blogger have many of the same advantages. Some of them can really help you succeed online.

5 advantages of WordPress over a static site.

First, easy addition of new content.

Adding a new article or page to a blog is about as fast and easy as it can get. Using built in features like WordPressIt or using software like Windows Live Writer also make adding a quote from a news site or other source as a base for a page easy.

Second, easy page and text styling.

No need to learn CSS or html when you are just starting. You can find plenty of free templates to use to change the look of your site. You can keep your text well highlighted and correctly marked with CSS just by using the <h1> <h2> <h3> and other CSS tags in the blog text editor. This keeps your content looking consistent and professional.

Third, it is easy to add extras to your site.

Want to take a poll? There is a plugin. Want to add music? There is a plugin. Plugins make adding features to your site fast and easy. Often, trying to do the same thing on a traditional web page takes a lot of hand coding and knowledge. With WordPress, it is fairly painless to find the plugin to do what you want at WordPress.org and simple upload it to your plugin folder. Click activate and it’s ready to go.

Fourth, easy internal SEO.

The use of categories for posts gives your site an easy to follow navigation. It also improves the SEO of your internal links. SEO plugins help even further. WordPress is amazingly effective at SEO right from the setup.

Fifth, RSS.

The recent RSS reader contest between John Chow and Shoemoney brought RSS to the forefront. What would happen to your traffic if you lost all your ranking with the search engines? Internet marketers are always talking about building a list. RSS is an easy way to get that list of your readers. Far more people will subscribe to an RSS feed than will ever give you their email address. RSS can make you Google-slap proof.

There are many other advantages to using a blog over a static site.

Do you have any other you would like to share.

Make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed too!

I just converted my How To Take Better Photos site to WordPress.

Originally, I created the site in Dreamweaver.

It was a bit of a chore learning how to do it. Additionally, whenever I wanted to add content, it took a lot of time.

This is what it used to look like.

Clicking on the image will take you to the new page.

With a static site, adding a page has some extra work to it.

Once you write the content, you add it to a page template. Then, you must change the links on the rest of the pages on the site to point to it. For me, this is enough to make me not add much in the way of content since the site was built.

The conversion from static site to WordPress took a while to accomplish.

The first task was to enter the content into the blog. I created a WordPress blog offline on my computer to do this. I used some free software called XAMMPLite to create the server to run WordPress.

The trick was to keep the content and pages with the same addresses they had in the static site.

You do not want to lose any links your site has built up already. You want to take advantage of any traffic you are already getting.

I used the permalinks feature in WordPress to reproduce the link structure of the original site.

One problem I had was I used subfolders for the various articles originally.

This was a problem. I was able to create a permalink structure that gave nearly every page the same URL as it had before. At least I think so. There are a few pages I was not able to keep with the same URL. These pages are not important anyway and should not have any links to them.

Once I had entered the content, it was time to convert the site.

I used the WordPress export feature to export the content and categories to a file.

I deleted the original site on the host.

I created the MYSQL database for WordPress. I edited the wp_config file to show the database, user, and password before I uploaded. I then uploaded the WordPress files to the server. I am using the Semiologic Pro for the theme and content manager on the site, so I had all the files I needed.

Only two major steps left

First, recreate the permalink structure I has used offline. Next, import the content file I had exported. All the pages were there in the right categories. Just a little fine tuning to do.

A few things needed to be fixed.

Links in the content from the static site no longer worked. I needed to find these and point them to the right pages. For a photography site, I have had (still have) very few images, but they needed to be uploaded to WordPress and replaced. Also, I needed to put the ads back on the site.

Semiologic has an ad managing system.

I want to take advantage of this so I did not keep the ads that were on the original pages. The next version of Semiologic has even better ad management that I think will be an asset, not only to me, but to regular readers.

I will be able to show AdSense to search engine traffic and new viewers and show fewer or different ads to regular readers.

I will be updating this site to Semiologic Pro soon also. I think my regular readers here will really appreciate it also. I should be making the switch within the next couple weeks.

In all, I have managed to keep much of the original look of the site.

I now have a 3 column layout. Right now, I have a mostly white theme where it was white and grey. I am planning to change this later.

Most importantly, it is now fast and easy to add content.

I am hoping to get an article up tonight. It will be about ghosts in pictures.

I hope you will check my photography site at http://www.photographybyjet.com.

Let me know what you think about it. If you have any questions about converting to WordPress from a static site, let me know here.