In my work as a blog consultant, I often add a blog onto a client’s existing site. Sometimes, this involves moving a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted solution. Sometimes, it involves changing the underlying hosting platform from Windows to Linux, because that’s what WordPress runs on.
The Sticking Point – Original Site Design
The sticking point for adding a blog to a Web site is the existing site’s original design. A lot depends on this. If the site was originally designed using web standards for the separation of code and layout/style and follows a vertically-oriented page layout, it will be quite easy for me to develop a blog design that matches it exactly or that at least bears a strong resemblance to the original.
Even if the original site is using an older code base and is designed using deprecated methods (deprecated is a term we use for methods which are no longer the standard or are acceptable), it can be done. It is accomplished by taking the graphics, color scheme, and fonts from the original site, and then using them to create a standards-compliant WordPress theme.
For sites which have been developed according to standards, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) information is reused for the blog, with some changes and additions to accommodate the unique elements of a WordPress blog theme.
Integrating Web Site and Blog
I don’t want to get too technical here, but WordPress themes are made up of a collection of files and images inside of a folder. You upload the folder to your WordPress blog, and switch to the theme in your Presentation admin page. The files collectively are all the elements of a WordPress blog’s structural and visual design. They use special information called template tags, which are used to make your blog do its thing.
By taking your original site’s design and combining it with the CSS and template tags and files of a WordPress theme, I can create a blog design that matches (more or less) your original site. The theme can be created on my own system, so even if you don’t yet have a blog, I can develop the blog’s theme.
Because WordPress needs a database to hold all the information for the blog, a database needs to be created on your Web server. Then, the WordPress software can be installed and configured. Plugins, which enhance and extend WordPress’ functionality, are added. Then the theme can be uploaded and activated.
And now you have a blog added to your Web site!
Other Considerations
There are other considerations. One is that the original site and the blog have to link to each other so that the site’s visitors can easily go back and forth between the two. Often, entire navigation bars and other links are duplicated in the WordPress theme. A link to the blog is added to the original site’s design, and the circuit is complete.
Another is that there can be all kinds of technical glitches where the original site’s hosting configuration may not be very friendly to WordPress. The most common problem I run into is folder write permissions on the Web server. WordPress needs the ability to make changes, or, write to, the blog files. When this permission is denied, several important and necessary WordPress capabilities are blocked. So far, I’ve been able to resolve these issues every time by figuring out the technical solution or by working with my clients’ Web hosting companies.
Oasis Spa and Salon – an Example of How to Add Blog to Web Site
Oasis Spa and Salon in the state of Washington wanted to add a blog to their site, which they call eNews. This was an example of a standards-compliant website, so it was easy to use its existing code base in order to build a blog theme that looks exactly like the original site. This project was completed several months ago. I keep in touch with the salon’s owner and she reports the blog has been a success. If you visit and take a look at it, you can see that she’s using it to drive customer visits to the salon by promoting products, services, and special offers–very smart!
Steve Yastrow – Adding a Blog to a Web Site with a Twist
For Steve Yastrow, a marketing consultant, speaker, and author, we did something a little different. We added a blog, but with a twist. The blog replaced the home page of his original site, and the page navigation on the blog links to the original pages of the old site. There is a bit of a difference in the look and feel between the old site pages and the blog. Eventually, The old site pages may become blog pages.
Possibilities
As you can see, there are a few possibilities for how to do this. There are two other scenarios that are related to adding a blog to a Web site: keeping the blog separate and scrapping the old site altogether in favor of a new site that uses WordPress as a CMS for all pages and content (which people are doing more often). I’ll write more about those options later. Be sure you don’t miss them: subscribe to my blog so you always get the latest.
Photo by JAGwired
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Timely post. Although, I don’t currently want to move my blog to my company site, I am trying to figure out if I can integrate an RSS Feed for a particular category on my blog and have those posts show up in mini-form on a page on the company site.
Is this possible?
A good guide for WordPress users, definitely. I think one of the things I’m most pleased about with my blog is that I fully incorporated the design into an existing website from Blogger, which can be a pain to skin. Not that I’m touting Blogger as a best option, but it does demonstrate that you can do a lot even without the fully hosted flexibility of Wordpress (while my Blogger account is “hosted” it’s not the same as the fully hosted nature of Wordpress).
@ Aruni – There are several ways/services to do that. Depending on your comfort level with HTML and JavaScript, you can do it yourself. Just search for “rss to html” and you should do okay. I’ve done this sort of thing for clients, as well.
@ Robin – Any effort you make to appear more professional is a step in the right direction. When using Blogger with your own domain, you can customize it and integrate thoroughly into a site. The biggest disadvantage is that, frankly, Blogger’s commenting stinks. But now third party commenting tools like Disqus and Intense Debate exist.
I was wondering about one thing. Your statement: “Sometimes, it involves changing the underlying hosting platform from Windows to Linux, because that’s what WordPress runs on.”
Me, I’ve run both WP and MT on both Windows and Linux and have yet to see any differences between them. So did you mean something else?
Would it be easy to go the other way around? I have Wordpress installed in a /blog folder (I only have the blog now) and eventually want to build a website in my main (root) folder using WP as a CMS.
I assume I’d have to install WP again into the root folder to do it. Can the old blog link up seamlessly (so I can keep it intact)?
Thanks for any help.
@ Narc – Nope. I meant exactly what I said. In many hosting situations, you will simply not get WordPress to run on a Microsoft IIS server. It certainly is possible to get WordPress to run on a Microsoft server, but most people seem to agree that it’s not easy, and it isn’t an option most people can choose when they’re buying hosting as far as I know.
@ Karen – Doing this can be a little tricky, but if you change the blog’s location in WordPress options, then move the files and folders via FTP, it SHOULD work out okay. Remember to back everything up first so that if it doesn’t work you can move/copy files back to the way they were. Do some research on step by step process for this and make sure you understand it before you attempt it.
Oh! You meant on IIS. Yeah, I was flying WP on Apache (on Windows).
Come to think of it, I seem to recall some kludging I had to do to get WP-Cache working (symlinks? on Windows?), but that wasn’t too amazingly bad. Still, if that’s the kind of crap to be expected, then I see what you mean.
Thanks for the info!
I guess the point is I don’t WANT to move the existing blog out of the /blog folder (for fear of it falling apart). I want to keep it and add another site to the root folder and just link them together.
But I don’t know if it will work in the long run or if it’s nuts to install another WP in the root folder.
If I’m even making sense…I’m not a total ‘techie’, sorry.
Thanks for your help.
@ Karen – This isn’t exactly a tech support forum
BUT if you were to add another WordPress installation to the root, you could edit the wp-congfig.php file to point to the same database you’re already using. Then you copy contents of the wp-content folder over from the old blog to the new one. If you’re using a good, well-coded theme, your links should be fine. You will need to create 301 redirects in your .htaccess file so that you don’t break all the incoming links to your blog from other sites.
Sorry Michael…didn’t mean to go off on a tech tangent. Thanks for all the info and don’t be surprised if I commission your services in the future. You’ll be the first guy I call
One thing to definitely do is make sure you have a backup of the database before moving anything. I recently moved my blog from blog.domain.com to a different directory and ran into problems.
One thing that I didn’t consider is that I when upgraded my WP version it used a couple of different tables in the database and I probably spent an hour trying to repair it.
Thank you for this wonderful set of instructions. I have been manually adding static pages via ftp to my site for almost a year now. I had previously tried unsuccessfully tried to implement a blog.
Hopefully, now I’ll be able to do it right, and make my and my webmaster’s life a whole lot simpler.
I can’t believe I’m reading this, Michael! I am actually planning to move my blog to a subdirectory, so that my domain looks something like a splash page, with links to my blog, photoblog, resume, etc.
That looks a little more professional, I think, and I need a professional website now.
What do you suggest I do next? I mean, how do I move my blog to a subdirectory, e.g. http://chenpn.com/blog/?
Great stuff. I have been struggling with this myself. I run a blog on a totally separate system with little or no cross linking. Thanks!
Jeffrey
IonHomeInspection.com
Houston, Katy, Sugar Land
@ Jeffrey – Yup. I’ll be danged if I can find a link to your blog from your main site!
After taking a peek at your site, I would suggest you do the entire site in WordPress. Things aren’t quite jiving in that template you bought for your website. 
But at the very least, you can link the two together in a more prominent way so that they can drive some traffic to each other. That would be a good idea.
I’ve got a static site that I want to change the looks of, using a new stylesheet. Unfortunately, unlike the old, it doesn’t have a matching theme for Wordpress. Looks like I either have to learn how to make the stylesheet work with WP, or just download your autumn street theme. Yah, it’s easier just to download yours for now. Thanks.
I will be playing with the other stylesheet. It seems it’s time I figure out how to port something to WordPress. Thanks for making it sound not too hard in this post. But which way do you think is better…finding a theme design that’s similar and just changing that CSS stylesheet, or starting from scratch? The one I have is xhtml valid, but it doesn’t use the same naming convention for the ids (i.e. “right” instead of “sidebar,” etc.).
@ Sue – the autumn street theme isn’t widget-ready (it’s old) so beware. In order to adapt any CSS for WordPress, you can create your own id’s and classes for various divs and template tag items in the WordPress code. It’s actually easier to use a WordPress theme’s CSS to style a static site, just remove all the WordPress-specific items from it.
Thanks for the reply, Michael.
Widgetizing a theme isn’t hard, I’ve done it before, so will do it with Autumn (I do like it, just thought I’d tell you so it doesn’t feel unloved
). I did kind of suspect that the WordPress to static site is the easier way to go, thanks for the confirmation.
I’ve got one more day before having to go back to the day job, so will play around with things.
Thank You !
Any recommendations if I can’t change my hosting to Linux. I want to add a blog to an established ecommerce site built with asp and hosted on a dedicated windows server/MSsql.
Thanks!
@aw – Check out these search results for WordPress on IIS. I’m sure there is some information among these results that will help you.
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