At first I thought I knew what you were asking, but then had to
re-read it. You are good at making php pages, but you want to toss
that out and turn it into a wordpress site? If that's it, the question
is why?

The way you are doing is perfect. Since you already are doing
php, then you know how easy it is to update it. If the pages
are ranked and kicking butt, why mess with success?

I do all my pages in php.
Header
left menu
content
footer

The header is split in two so I have a unique title.

The content is obviously a template for a new article.

All that really needs to be updated is the new link for
the new article in the left menu. Done and done.

You should have this already done anyway if you are doing php.

Since you are good, you should be able to modify it even
better.

Leave all the php pages where they are and use php to manage
them. Nothing beats it. Again, why mess with success?

Paul

Hi Tim,

If a CMS is your goal for management and you'd rather use Wordpress than creating your own - you'll want to do 301 redirects to your new pages to avoid duplicate content issues with search engines.

Basically, if you're moving domains or if the page url is different in any way (even without the ".php") then it will be indexed as a different page in the search engines and cause the issues. The solution if you are moving domains/urls would be to create a .htaccess file and do 301 redirects to the new pages. A 301 redirect is search engine friendly and will pass on your "link juice" to the new pages.

Personally, I can see why there is a draw to Wordpress for quick management, but in reality it is a php based system and anyone with the right skills can accomplish the same things without the Wordpress platform (I think that's what Paul is saying above). If you plan to scale this out across many domains, I personally like the idea of coding a central CMS for management.

However, Wordpress is a pretty SEO friendly out-of-box framework that makes it pretty easy to manage and update. If that's the route you choose make sure you do 301 redirects and avoid any chance at a business breaking Google penalty.

Cheers,
Kris

Here's an easy way to manage it.. and takes about 30 seconds..

Set your permalinks to %postname%.php and give your new posts the exact same title as your old ones or change the slug manually.

But it will only work on posts, and not pages.. for that you'll need something like WordPress › Shantz Wordpress Prefix Suffix WordPress Plugins

We experience this problem a lot when taking on old sites.

301 redirect the old PHP pages to the the WordPress pages whose content most closely resembles that of the old pages.

Leave them right where they are at. Make them look like the wordpress theme, and nobody will ever know the difference.

If you want to add them to wordpress - copy and paste the content, and then remove the original file