Taking over an previously developed website

[cgilmour]

Hi,

A colleague has a website hosted by Ionos and wants to take on a previously developed website himself. It's mainly and information site an doesn't involve transactions/form submissions. Previously from what I can see, this site was developed using frontpage some time ago and is hosted by Ionos. I had a quick look around and it appears the stylesheets, javascript, html etc. is all there in a hierarchical directory structure but he now wants to use his Apple Mac to change it/ build it further.

 

A couple of questions

a) Would he be able to take this existing website on using a Mac based web development tool - e.g. wordpress i.e does that fact that it was developed in front page make it difficult to take on with Mac based software?

 

b) Any recommendations for Wordpress or other Mac based software for web development?

 

Thanks for any advice

Chris

[mavhc]

Either you just use an html editor, or you start from scratch, given getting the content is much harder than making a website containing the content, might as well just start again

[3s-gtech]

Wordpress is web based so completely independent of user OS. It’d probably be easier and better to copy the content across to a CMS - you could use an editor like Espresso but it’s going to be a lot of work to get it up to scratch, responsive, secure etc.

[dhicks]

It's mainly and information site an doesn't involve transactions/form submissions.

 

As pointed out already, tools such as Wordpress and similar are web-based, it won't matter what computer you are using them from.

 

Your easiest option might be to have a tool crawl the site and convert the content to plain text, then paste that into whichever content management system your newly chosen website provider uses. Personally, I prefer static site generators such as Hugo or Jekyll, with the source content stored as Markdown, but that's going to depend on who is maintaining the content.

[mrstrong]

I've used https://www.httrack.com/ before to grab a site,

looks like not been updated in a while so may struggle with modern sites but worth a try to get the content

then I'd start again with whatever web dev tools / env you prefer/know

 

Also find these links with a quick google search

https://www.lifewire.com/top-website-copying-programs-2655052

https://www.scrapehero.com/open-source-web-scraping-frameworks-and-tools/

Edited May 5, 2020 by mrstrong
typo

[cgilmour]

Thanks for all the suggestions and information. Will try to grab the site and go from there.

 

Cheers

Chris