So you have built a site using go live a few years ago and you added a wordpress template to it! Now you decide you need to revamp the site and control the whole site with Wordpress as your main site program. Where in the world do we start!

For over a year I have been playing out the big transformation in my head. So many things to worry about while transferring the data you have built. First thing I don’t want to lose any data or break any links! First thing make a copy of your wordpress install and save it on your computer! You should already a copy of your Golive site on your computer also!

Like most newbie web developers I was so excited about building the site that I missed some important information. One of the first big mistakes I made was how to set my permalink structure! By default wordpress sets your permalinks to build like
yoursite/ ?p=123, just plain bad for any seo for search engines.

My first site I didn’t know this valuable information until I had built a bunch of pages. So I ended up changing my permalink structure to /%postname%/! Changing it to post name allows you to customize your link and make it search engine friendly.

To make the change you will have to go into your cpanel go into .htaccess file and make it writable and then save changes. Be sure to write down the settings before you change this so you can get it back to where you had it!

Make you select show hidden files, or you will never see your .htaccess file!

Here is the link from wordpress going into more detail!
http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

Another thing I would change now would not be naming my extension wordpress! So now every time I add a new page the extension will have wordpress in the address. Instead of calling it wordpress you can call it store, directory, or whatever flows with your site!

If you are going to install wordpress on your server as the main site this not such a big issue. You will select your main (URL) as your WordPress address (URL). So when you post it will look like this http://yoursite/store/ with your permalinks set to /%postname%/. When you are making a new page in wordpress you have the option to name your page!