Five-Month Anniversary with WordPress

It’s been five months since the conversion to WordPress and overall I am very happy with the result.    We’re seeing between 100 and 150 page hits per day, about 22,000 altogether over the five month period. Although I’d like to make a few modifications, the overall “look and feel” of the site is simpler and cleaner, and it works better on mobile devices and with different screen sizes.

WordPress is much superior to the previous DreamWeaver-developed site as far as authoring is concerned. Editing existing webpages is tremendously simpler than it was on the old site.  Adding new pages is also a faster and simpler process.  The most time-consuming elements are converting footnotes and end notes into in-line text (as required by the WP plugin) and inserting HTML to properly format list items and boxes.

But nothing is perfect, and one of my complaints is that WordPress has some annoying limitations when it comes to formatting text.  Adjusting line spacing is a major pain that requires adding HTML to virtually every page.

The conversion to WordPress did not apply to much of the information on the website that continues to be presented in the form of pdf files. A number of text documents, perhaps 2,000 printed pages overall, cannot be converted into webpages for two reasons. About half are dated lists of records formatted in two columns similar to HTML definition lists, a format not supported by WordPress. (Yes I could manually and laboriously convert a Word document into HTML, but it would still remain outside the WordPress structure.) The remaining documents utilize outline numbering, which is not possible in WordPress (though I suppose it’s really an HTML issue rather than a WordPress issue). At any rate, a good deal of the website will remain as linked files outside the WordPress structure.