Converting a Static Website to WordPress: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Part 1
Not many people know this, not that it’s a secret or anything, but I have a website about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein that has been online since 1996.
In the early 90′s I was researching the origins of the woman’s movement and read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The first version of the site was called Mary Shelley’s Private Frankenstein Musical (the name later changed to The Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Resource Center). It had a black background, all of the text was centered, and I had auto-playing midi music. At the time it seemed like the height of technology but I am so glad I was doing that in 1996 and not 2006. It existed on my web space on my ISP so I had a URL like http://myhost.com/~kwbridge (remember those). I don’t have a copy of this monstrosity and searched the wayback machine but couldn’t locate a version of it. It looks like as the site got moved around that I added redirects to the new URL and those got archived rather than the site.
Eventually the site started getting too much traffic to be on an ISP ~ domain so I had to buy a domain name for it and get a real web host. For whatever reason, I didn’t initially buy kimwoodbridge.com I bought desert-fairy.com – wacky. I’m not sure what exactly I was thinking but I was considering a site about fairy tales, which I never did.
I wrote essays, answered a lot of emails, and spent time editing essay submissions. For some time, it was the Mary Shelley and Frankenstein go-to site. Around the time my daughter was born or slightly before, I started to lose interest. The site was existing at kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel but it was stagnant and I didn’t update it for almost a decade.
The last incarnation of it before I moved the site into WordPress, looked like this:
I love the little ‘new’ images the fact that I was proud of being in the HTML Writer’s Guild ;-). Although I did know enough at the time to use .shtml and include files so that a change to the sidebar or the footer didn’t require a change to every single file.
About a year or so ago, I realized that even without me doing anything on the site that it was still getting quite a bit of traffic and searches on certain keywords such as ‘frankenstein essays’ were producing first place results in google. I had put a lot of work into this at one time and decided it was time to get a new domain name for it, put the content into WordPress, and monetize it.
So, I bought the domain marywshelley.com, slightly custmomized an existing theme, and moved the content over. The new site looks like this:
In part 2 of this article, I will discuss the logistics of transferring a static site to WordPress as this turned out to be a history of my involvement with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein online.
(This isn’t an April Fool’s joke ;-)
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11 Responses to “Converting a Static Website to WordPress: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Part 1”
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April 2, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Very cool Kim, I never woulda guessed you were into these things. :)
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April 3, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Hi Dennis – I’m not as into it as I used to be but I still have interest in the subject. I was kinda fun reviving the old site.
April 4, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Well it was helpful to me. I am quite into the genre and completely forgot about it. I’ve been thinking for a while that the 1913 (1911?) silent Nosferatu was the first movie
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April 3, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Hi Kim.
I had no idea about this site. Great job. Hey, almost all of her works are available at Amazon for free! (Kindle versions)
Cheers
George
.-= George Angus´s last blog ..I Told Myself I Wouldn’t Do this Anymore, But… =-.
April 3, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Hi George – Thanks! Yeah, it wasn’t a secret but I wasn’t advertising it either – I can’t believe that it’s 14 years old – ancient on the internet.
May 21, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Was there ever a part 2 of this? :)
May 21, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Hi Marilyn – Not yet :-) Jeez … I didn’t realize it had already been so long. I’ll make it a priority.
March 14, 2011 at 11:41 am
Hey my teacher is making us do a facebook page on frankenstein. Just wondering if anyone knew any good info to put down for Interests for the monster/wretch anything is good and i would also like to know the URL of the web page to get to your information.
P.S If you can help that would be great thanks.
March 14, 2011 at 11:43 am
Hi Nick – Interests for the monster?
Have you looked at my Mary Shelley site?
http://marywshelley.com
There are a number of essays and links to a bunch of other Frankenstein related sites.
April 14, 2011 at 9:18 am
We were both members of the HTML Writers Guild? Yay! That was so cool, I agree, to display the icon. Did you use the “Best Viewed in IE” or “Best Viewed in Netscape” button too?
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April 14, 2011 at 9:25 am
LOL – I took a bunch of classes through them to that my job paid for – javascript, xml.
I don’t think that version of the site had a best viewed in button but an earlier version probably did.