 | The Big Move: Website to iGrOOpTuesday, January 22nd 2008 @ 7:30 AM (not yet rated) |
I started my first "membership site" / website back in 2003. Then, in October of 2006, I started building what was to be the ideal membership site / online group platform (iGrOOps), and someday, the ultimate website platform. It wasn't until today, that I finally completely moved my "old school" website to iGrOOps. I would like to share my "move notes" with everyone out there in the same boat: moving a website to an iGrOOp.
First let's ask and answer the question, "why move?". OK, we asked it, now let's answer it. My website was a simple site as far as membership sites go; I was not charging a fee for membership. I had "integrated" some GNU public domain software and wrote most of the backend code myself. It did it's job. But as most of us know, staying dormant on the Internet is not the way to success; it is almost a sure way to obsolescence. My members were asking for features I did not have. I was not taking advantage of the membership base I had built and members were leaving faster than they were coming. What had worked in 2003, was no longer working.
I will admit, I created iGrOOps mainly for selfish reasons. I wanted the ideal platform not only for my one current site, but for the many other sites for which I had ideas brewin'. The construction of iGrOOps began in mid October 2006 with the first public release on February 16, 2007. I was not even close to being ready to move my entire site over, but I did create a sister site -- it was my paid membership site. As time passed, we have added more and more features to iGrOOps making it very tempting to move completely. However, we sold many products on the site, and at the time, iGrOOps did not offer an e-commerce component. Now that it does, I was ready to make the big move.
Here are some notes that you just might find helpful if moving from an existing website to iGrOOps.
- SEO placement. My site "YearToSuccess.com" is currently #7 in Google for the keyword "success". This was no easy task to get it there. It took years of content building and plenty of links and traffic. In fact, I have many articles that are #1-5 for other keywords. I did not want to lose these by changing the path. So I created the mapping feature of iGrOOps that allows me to enter the old path and associate it with the new iGrOOps URL. Now, old links will work and I should keep my place in the Search Engines.
- E-mail. I am still using my old server to process all email at that domain. I found out that GoDaddy does not have an e-mail service. When I moved my domain, I just moved the "A record" and left the MX records intact.
- Forms. I had a few forms on my old site. These were simple form-to-email forms. iGrOOps cannot handle custom forms like this so I had a choice: I could have used the iFrame option in iGrOOps to pull the forms in from another server or just convert the forms to an e-mail request. Based on the activity of the forms (little activity) I chose the latter.
- Existing Member Posts. My site had many posts at one time, but I discontinued the boards because of excessive spam. There is no way I wanted to sift through that garbage to get a handful of relative posts. However, had it been worth it, I would have imported the content. This is a custom service offered by iGrOOps.
- Mailing lists. Over the past 4+ years of running the site, I have created an active list of over 8000 addresses. Keep in mind that my course WAS just a one year course, so after the year people would leave. The 8000 were members who wanted to keep repeating the course -- or so I thought. Now I had very good bounce rules and filters in place, so I know the 8000 addresses were not bouncing. But what I did not realize is that they were mostly spam / junk accounts. When I imported the list into the iGrOOps newsletter feature and send out confirmations of the addresses, only about 500 came back. I thought the iGrOOps system was broken at first, until I started monitoring my new "subscribers". About 90% of my "subscribers" were spambots! These are scripts that insert spam e-mail addresses (mostly .ru and .cn addresses) that are used to collect information such as URLs and other e-mail addresses from your mailings. Thanks to the iGrOOps double-optin requirement, these spambots are no longer making it into my list and thanks to the reconfirmation procedure my list is lean and mean, and just as effective.
Ironically, I had to follow the same advice I have been giving all customers that move to an iGrOOps system. "iGrOOps can do about 95% of everything you want. As long as you are a little flexible, moving will not be a problem." I had to rethink the way I did some things, like displaying my articles, removing quizzes, etc. but it wasn't a sacrifice, it was just a different way of presenting the information -- often better and more effective.
Moving YearToSuccess.com completely on the iGrOOps platform was like giving the site a virtual enema. My links are all valid and up to date, all the old, useless content has been removed, photos have been updated -- if the site had feelings, I bet it would feel fantastic! More important, I have the web 2.0 tools and applications that I never had on the old website. My members can now communicate and share ideas like never before, and my ability to share multimedia information with my members has added a fresh new twist to our former learning environment. The future is looking bright!
