Thread

Hello all

I have been assigned to create a website with 300+ articles. Articles are organized into categories. Custom article URLs if possible. All I want is for the site to be easy to manage. To be future-proof. Easy to make site-wide changes. As stress-free as possible basically :D

SEO is very important. The site will be used to promote our big sister sites and/or adsense. Will use Google Analytics for tracking.

My plan is to sign-up with EngineHosting and have a licensed version of EE installed on the server. I would get the S-1 plan which has:

1 GB space
25 GB transfer  
250 MB database
20gb bandwidth
$20/month

Will this hosting plan suffice for a site that will mostly be dealing with text articles?

Speaking of articles, we have over 300 microsoft word documents. This may be a long shot but is there any easy way to import these documents into new pages? Bear in mind we want this site to be as SEO-friendly as possible.

I only know basic HTML. If someone is talking to me about CSS or PHP, I understand what they’re saying but there’s no way in hell I could do any of it myself. I’m THAT guy 😉

Is ExpressionEngine easy to use without much coding knowledge? I noticed there were EE training screencasts which look like an excellent resource. Should I start there? I really really want to get to grips with EE because we will soon be converting all of our static “Dreamweaver sites” to it 😊

I would like to have this project finished by June. We have developers who are great with HTML, CSS and PHP among other stuff but no ExpressionEngine developers. Do I need one, especially if I’m using EngineHosting?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, apologies for the very long post but I need to be safe. 😊

All the best,
Ruairidh

FWIW, my personal site—which has about 4,000 entries or articles on it and gets a decent amount of traffic—has been hosted on an S1 plan with EngineHosting for over two years now, and it’s been more than sufficient.

Re: importing Word Docs directly into EE, there’s no way to do that “out of the box” that I know of. Depending on the complexity of your Word files, it might be possible to convert them to some sort of intermediate format, such as XML, and then go from there.

Re: EE’s learning curve, it can be a little steep. EE is a very flexible system, but all of that flexibility does come with a price, especially if all you’ve been using is something “static” akin to Dreamweaver. However, there are a host of training materials and resources out there that should help you along. Personally, I’ve found Train-ee to be very useful. Even if you’re not building a church site, his “Building a Church Site” series of tutorials is full of great stuff.

Same goes for “Education and Training” articles on the EE blog.

Hi, Ruairidh - welcome to the forums!  opuszine has you covered really well here; I’d just like to add that for your hosting questions, I’d recommend contacting EngineHosting directly.  They are our sister hosting company but are separate so directing those specific questions to them will get you better answers.

Have you Tried out EE yet?  I think that would help you quite a bit.

To be future-proof. Easy to make site-wide changes. As stress-free as possible basically.

That’s what dreams are made of, right?

Site wide changes in EE can be made very easily, though it’s dependent somewhat on the user making the changes.

SEO is very important. The site will be used to promote our big sister sites and/or adsense. Will use Google Analytics for tracking.

No problems there. EE’s URL string is among the best of any CMS, and Analytics can be dropped into EE templates with a click.

My plan is to sign-up with EngineHosting and have a licensed version of EE installed on the server… Will this hosting plan suffice for a site that will mostly be dealing with text articles?

That will depend on the traffic to the site. What kind of traffic is expected?

Speaking of articles, we have over 300 microsoft word documents. This may be a long shot but is there any easy way to import these documents into new pages? Bear in mind we want this site to be as SEO-friendly as possible.

In terms of SEO, the articles just need to match keywords with URL string with title with headers, etc. That’s standard stuff and should not be a problem.

Importing from Word will be a problem, since Word embeds all kinds of crapola in the file. Even copy and past from Word can be nasty and problematic.

Plain text is your friend.

I only know basic HTML. If someone is talking to me about CSS or PHP, I understand what they’re saying but there’s no way in hell I could do any of it myself. I’m THAT guy.

Uh oh. If you’re building a site with any complexity at all, then you’ll need to know your HTML and CSS. PHP knowledge won’t matter. I don’t even know how to spell PHP.

Who is designing and building the site?

Is ExpressionEngine easy to use without much coding knowledge? I noticed there were EE training screencasts which look like an excellent resource. Should I start there? I really really want to get to grips with EE because we will soon be converting all of our static “Dreamweaver sites” to it.

Obviously, those are good places to start. As a CMS, EE brings a few features to the table that go far beyond a simple HTML file that represents a page. But if you can do your site in Dreamweaver, then you can easily chop up the pieces and drop them into EE’s templates.

I would like to have this project finished by June. We have developers who are great with HTML, CSS and PHP among other stuff but no ExpressionEngine developers. Do I need one, especially if I’m using EngineHosting?

Having the others around will be a benefit. All they’ll need to learn will be EE’s tags, which, if they can handle XHTML, CSS, and PHP, should be OK. And, unless you learn it all yourself, you’ll need some extra experience, whether you’re using EngineHosting or not.

Wow, I don’t even know where to begin replying. Thank you opuszine (nice site btw), Lisa and Ronnie for the help.

opuszine, it’s good to know that you are on the S1 plan, it sounds like it will suit our needs perfectly. Most of our sites get between 1 and 3 thousand hits a day but it’s hard to tell what the results of this project will be like. Train-ee looks like a great resource, I’ll check it out, thanks!

Lisa I will contact EngineHosting when I order the hosting plan and EE license 😉 I’m definitely going to proceed with EE, it’s a no-brainer. I may not be the best person to develop it but we have plenty of people who can.

All I need is a good CSS designer (probably from Elance)and an EE developer for the odd bit of help or just someone we can run to for Tech Support.

Ronnie, thanks for warning me about Word docs being a problem. I wasn’t expecting that functionality to be in EE natively but it’s nice to know it’s a possibility. We’ll stick to plain text, like you said.

I’m very excited to get started on the project and I’m sure it will be a great learning experience. You will most likely be hearing from me very soon, hah.

Thanks a lot for the swift help guys, I really appreciate it.

All the best,
Rury

Rury, there is a Word to Text converter. The free version adds some text to the top and bottom of the file, and you can’t do batch mode, but you’d be able to test it.

It also converts curly quotes to regular quotes.