Converting an HTML web site to CMS?
 

Before I started dabbling in video, and even still to this day in fact, my Big Hobby was classic passenger trains. I amassed quite a collection of copies of the Official Guide of the Railways; essentially the one-stop national timetable for every railroad passenger line in the country between 1868 and the 1980s.

I took some of those timetables and put them online in a site I call Streamliner Schedules. I haven't added any new content in over a year, but I'm not abandoning the site. I'd like to convert the HTML pages which I created myself to a modern content management system; possibly WordPress but preferably Drupal. However, I'm a neophyte with both platforms.

I'm hesitant to outsource this work to any of the "services" which continually flood my public email inbox, mainly because I'm not sure of what critters might end up in the code which I don't know about. I wouldn't mind paying someone a reasonable fee to develop a custom template or set thereof, but I'd like to do most of the work of converting myself. Any suggestions or recommendations for trustworthy developers?

How many HTML pages does the site have?

Looking at it, I see pages nested down quite a bit. I'm not sure how deep that rabbit hole is.

Most of the content is nested four levels deep; Home Page >> Major Directory >> Sub Directory >> Content. But there is also an additional level for "extras"...pictures, PDF scans, etc.

I lost count of the number of pages some time ago, but I've got approximately 200 different train timetables up now.

For non-DIY, what sort of budget would you have for getting this done?

Probably in the $1000 range for developing templates and such. But not right now; I've just spent all my discretionary funds!

I could go a little higher over time; I know there's quite a bit of content. But not a whole lot higher.

If this is still something on your radar, we can probably give you a good recommendation by early next year, as we're currently working with a few parties for some in-house development work.

The issue of budget will come down both to (1) money and (2) how much you're willing to offload onto yourself. A $1k budget usually means outsourcing to India, Pakistan, some eastern European countries, Malaysia/Philippines area, or another low-income country. They can do great work in those places, but realize that you can run into communication issues. So be prepared to explain yourself, and re-explain yourself, sometime multiple times. And the bigger the project, the more explaining you'll do, the longer it takes.

If you want an off-the-self WordPress theme, minimal design tweaked, then there are some options there as well.

Lots of ways to play this.

The most important thing for you to do right now is to make an outline of every page of the site. See if you can streamline it to fit into the workflow of a WordPress site: blogs, pages, maybe an FAQ type plugins, etc.

That would be a complete remake, not a 'conversion'.

Various tools are available to convert your HTML web pages to a better CMS. Instead of drupal I advise you convert to WordPress if all you are going to host are blogs and videos.
Wordpress can be customized in as many ways as possible. It is a better CMS than any other.

In my (limited) experience Wordpress has a huge amount of overhead causing an increase in load time on even the simpelest of webpages.