Door 22 Creative decided that they wanted to change the technology providing the News and Portfolio sections of their website so that they could easily update the content themselves whilst cost effectively preserving their investment into the main Coldfusion based website which works very well. They asked if I could build these sections of their website using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) and integrate it with the rest of the website which is written in Coldfusion.
Having provided me with great photoshop design files (psd) from which to construct the WordPress theme, I got stuck into the code and here are the results:
(click to enlarge)
To put this website together and maintain existing links indexed in search engines I did the following:
- Converted Door 22’s photoshop layered designs into XHTML/CSS templates
- Setup WordPress on LAMP hosting (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with a different DNS (Domain Name System) host (A record) on the same domain and developed the templates into a WordPress theme
- Edited the Coldfusion website code to create links to the new WordPress website so that they merge seamlessly together as a single website
- Edited many of the old News and Portfolio Coldfusion pages to create redirects to the content generated by WordPress and therefor preserve existing SEO links
Both Door 22 and I are delighted with the results of this project. I certainly ended up learning more about Coldfusion code than I ever expected to and I think this is a great example of a well thought out, easy to use website that has a superb design and search engine friendly code.