Convert static HTML website

rgrosz78
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Convert static HTML website

Post by rgrosz78 »

I created my company's website (www.softwarepolish.com) long ago using Microsoft Frontpage. About 10 years ago, my web hosting company (Aplus.net) stopped supporting Microsoft Frontpage. I have been making updates locally with Microsoft Frontpage, then uploading the changes using WS-FTP.

Over time, I keep finding various pages with broken links. In the past, I could use XENU to find all the broken links on my web site. But About 5 years ago, XENU stopped working. I tried several alternatives recently, but they all basically abort immediately after they start. Typical message is something like "forbidden request" or "connection error". And Aplus.net said they would NOT help me resolve the problem.

I need to migrate my Frontpage site to a modern web management system. It has about 2.5 GB of data and 50 web pages. I have been looking at using Wordpress.

I'm a total newb at WordPress and have just started learning about it. I have not found any easy solution to import / translate my Frontpage site to WordPress.

I'm curious if anyone has gone down this path before, or has any suggestions for me ...
Last edited by rgrosz78 on 25 Nov 2024, 22:30, edited 1 time in total.
Rick Groszkiewicz
Life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad coffee!)

JoeP
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by JoeP »

To begin, I've never done this myself so I'm just doing some searching. Here are a few articles I found - Hpw to migrate your website with ease, Move any site to Wordpress, & How to migrate to Wordpress from any website.
Joe

rgrosz78
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by rgrosz78 »

I had already done various searches, with similar results. Nothing that really tells me how to do this, short of lots of manual work.
Rick Groszkiewicz
Life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad coffee!)

JoeP
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by JoeP »

Sorry. You may be stuck with the manual work if none of the plugins mentioned help.
Joe

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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by ChrisGreaves »

rgrosz78 wrote:
26 Nov 2024, 02:27
I had already done various searches, with similar results. Nothing that really tells me how to do this, short of lots of manual work.
I'm not sure if I fully understand your problem, except for the "lots of manual work".

Back in 1997 I saw that Word97 supported a save-as-HTML and tried it. Humongous chunks of text, but ... just text; plain text.
I had a shot at writing a simple web compiler, which I use to this day (so 25+ years). The compiler saves me hours of time, because when I detect a typo in any one of 1,925 web pages, I just edit the source document (*.doc), save and close it. The next time the compiler sweeps through that tree, it detects the updated doc and re compiles and uploads the htm file.

In your situation you might end up copying each web page/wordpress page/whatever to the clipboard, then running a macro to paste the clipboard into a doc, insert headers/footers etc and save/close the file.
That would give you a starting point and (I hope) a quick transition to something under your control.
Once you have a controlled source, you can move on from there.
Cheers, Chris
Most of my hair had already fallen out by the time I learned that mousse is spelled with two esses

jolas
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by jolas »

Take a look at HTTrack Track Website Copier. It may help.
or
Is there an option to publish your frontpage website offline?

rgrosz78
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by rgrosz78 »

I already have the contents of my website on my local hard drive. I Frontpage to navigate to specific pages, and manually edit the html files.

I'm currently learning WordPress and learning what to do after I import the HTML pages.
Rick Groszkiewicz
Life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad coffee!)

rgrosz78
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by rgrosz78 »

I found a WordPress plugin to import HTML files directly
HTML-Import-2 by Stephanie Leary (2016)
But it did not work

Her code was on github:
https://github.com/stephanieleary/HTML-Import-2

I looked at forks of her code, and found a more recent version that does work:
https://github.com/seanvfs/HTML-Import-2
I downloaded the code as a ZIP file, but could not install it as a plugin. I had to delete the readme.txt file from the ZIP to install as a plugin.

I imported a few HTML files from my site, and looked carefully at the results. It took quite a bit of manual editing to get the pages to look the way I wanted. Some pages had lots of "junk HTML code" in the imported files that was specific to Microsoft FrontPage.

It may be better to create the web pages manually, one at a time. I can copy / paste from my web site into NotePad. Then copy the text into a new page in WordPress.
Rick Groszkiewicz
Life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad coffee!)

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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by ChrisGreaves »

rgrosz78 wrote:
06 Dec 2024, 03:10
... I can copy / paste from my web site into NotePad. Then copy the text into a new page in WordPress.
How many web pages, that is "Notepad files", :thumbup: are we talking about here?
10?
100?
1000?
10,000?

Thanks, Chris
"Management Measures"!
Most of my hair had already fallen out by the time I learned that mousse is spelled with two esses

rgrosz78
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Re: Convert static HTML website

Post by rgrosz78 »

There are maybe 200 web pages that I will be hand-editing. I won't bother bringing the obsolete stuff to the new site.
Rick Groszkiewicz
Life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad coffee!)