Season 5 Episode 28
I got such good feedback from you regarding the video versions of this Podcast, or I guess now videocast.
We're just going to call it the life creative and leave it at that. I'm going to pursue the video further. So hopefully, we're going to see an improvement in the quality.
Thank you for your feedback on the video and audio versions. I think it's appropriate for this Podcast or videocast. Having a video version, should you choose to watch it, is up to you or the audio version.
If there's something that I'm talking about, that's very visual. It gives me a way to put that on the screen for you when talking about it. So that's an avenue I'm going to be looking investigating.
In this episode, I will be talking about the decisions you make when merging projects. I'm going to give you an example from something that I've been doing for the last week.
I have been taking one of my websites and incorporating it into one of my older websites, the content in particular. So what am I talking about here?
Well, PeterWitham.com is a JAMstack website, what we call a static site. You don't need to worry about the details on that. There's just a lot of files involved.
The original older site around for years sits on WordPress, a very popular backend. You may or may not have heard of it. It uses a database as the backend.
I am incorporating 2020 and 2021 into the database because I stopped using it at the end of 2019. Not only does it take it a long time to bring all of that content in and update.
But one of the problems that you encounter when you're merging websites is people are used to the URL for a particular article or video, something like that. When you bring it over to another site, That URL may well change, even though you may keep the domain name.
So without getting technical here, I'm going to give you an example. If you went to a URL on the current site, it might not exist on the new one. The URL that people may have booked marked won't exist unless I fix it accordingly to match the old site. Now that's okay if you don't have a lot of content, but considering that the site has some 400+ posts, it's not practical for me to spend all the time going back and editing all of those posts.
Firstly, it's very time-consuming. Secondly, a lot of those posts may not be valid anymore. And thirdly, I know from looking at my data, and if you followed some other episodes where I told you to look at your data and learn from it, I know some of those blog posts barely get any visitors.
Some may not even get visitors at all. Is it worth my time to go and update all the URLs for those posts? The answer is no, probably not.
Now you might be thinking, but hang on a minute, Peter, you're going to lose people visiting those URLs at first. Yes, I will.
Most people find things by using a search engine, and eventually, those search engines will remap those old non-existent locations to the new ones. It won't happen overnight, probably, but it will happen at some point.
So that's going to take care of that for you. Don't obsess about the things that maybe don't need your time and attention.
I recommend what I'm doing here, looking at my data saying which are the viral posts. Okay. I should make those URLs work for the old site and the new site because that's the hot content.
And that's the one that's going to do better in search engines is going to do better. People have published bookmarks. They're telling their friends about them. Now. If you're fortunate, that's still a lot of posts. It's worth working on those.
So that's my advice for this episode.
- Think about priorities. What do I need to update and make sure it works from the old to the new.
- What will automatically update because of search engines, and I can leave it alone.
- What content doesn't matter, and I can leave for historical purposes. If people want to find it's going to appear in the search engine with the correct URL. Or they're going to dig through my site looking for it.
Those are three takeaways for you here.
Now that I've opened up the opportunity for video, I will be looking at how we can make the most of it in these episodes. It's going to be structured that if you're listening to the audio version of the Podcast, it will work for you as well.
