Hello all,

My web developer left me hung out to dry and I'm having some issues with finishing development of my site on wordpress. I'm looking to clean up some of the unnecessary HTML (especially towards the top of the page as this makes the site tough for search engines to read).

So I guess my question is, in a few users or admin's opinion, would CoffeeCup be the right solution for me and could I just import what's there and export it when I'm done? I'm going to go ahead and download a trial or something to poke around (probably should have done this before asking...), but any insight would be helpful. As I said earlier, I'm kind of hung out to dry at the moment with no copywriter, designer, developer (same guy did both). My partner had a large project he had to undertake.

Feel free to poke around my site. http://firstpageseoplus.com/

Thank you very much ahead of time!

Keep in mind, I have limited html experience beyond what I need for my SEO/marketing skills.

I guess importing the site into the HTML Editor could be done, but since you say your html knowledge is limited, it would be a helluva job to keep the various html and php parts in the right place, and uploading would also become a nightmare. WordPress uses lots of templates and included files, so that can easily become quite a mess.

Without html and css knowledge I think the Visual Site designer (short: VSD) would be the best programme for you, but that means starting over from scratch. (With the html Editor I would also recommend starting from scratch because of the problems I mentioned). I don't think importing a CMS site (made with WP, Joomla, Drupal etc) can be easily done into any other programme, unfortunately.

But anyway, if you choose one of the two CoffeeCup programmes, there are enough good people in here who can help you along.

I'll second what Inger is stating. If you don't have any html or php experience then your better off going with VSD and starting over. You might think it would be a daunting task but given the problems you would run into down the road I think you would be saving yourself a lot of headaches. You could publish your VSD site to a different director on your host for testing until you get it the way you want.Take the trial version for a spin to see what you think. I would also recommend getting the HTML editor to help you with the transition time from the WordPress site to the full VSD site.
Anyways lot of great info here in the forum if you get stuck.

First thing I would suggest is taking web design off your menu if you aren't able to do that

HTML Editor can edit anything you need to edit for a Wordpress or Joomla or whatever type of CMS you may work with. If you do things one file at a time it's not so bad at all. Yes Wordpress has a lot of files and a tricky file system, but you also can only edit specific things it will allow you to have access to so it's not as daunting of a job as it seems it could be. Do it piece work, open the files, copy the contents to the HTML editor and do your editing, copy the contents back into the page on Wordpress and save it, on to the next, and so on. Better to do it that way than get all the files mixed up on where they go etc.

Other than that, if you are having issues with this, you're most definitely not a web designer as your site shows you are. Or you're looking for a place to spam your link which will be removed shortly.

JoAnn :: from Viv

Free CC SEO provided by forum members for websites designed and made with CC html editor & VSD

FREE website design advice from our own resident HTML expert (you)

Free coding advice fro ERIC

FREE responsive design advice fro Paintbrush

Just to mention a few

Or Jack of all trades by spammers !!!!!

Maybe he sub-contracts the actual web building?

Anyway... If you need help changing something within your site (theme), I'd start here:
http://wordpress.org/support/theme/mantra

paintbrush: Thank you!

Yes I'm dying over here trying to figure out what is going on. I suppose I could scrap it and start over, but I was really hoping I wouldn't have to. It was about 6am my time when I started playing around with html editor, so I eventually just crashed.

Jo Ann: I outsource my work for content and design. As I'm sure you can see, I'm no professional in that department. If you want to remove my link, please feel free. I was hoping a few users could review it. When you mentioned the link, I checked source and noticed that all of your links in the forums are dofollow! I would rectify this immediately. Adding the nofollow tag will get rid of a lot of the spammers you refer to. Just a pointer

Thank you again all for your responses. It appears I will be downloading Visual Site Designer. I'm sure I'll be back with questions. Have a great day all!

Steven, after having taken a closer look at the source code of your site, I'm not clear about what you are thinking of removing from the top of the files. I don't know every bit of Wordpress files, but as far as I can see, the tags in the head section are all necessary. Well, you have the meta tag 'description' twice, but apart from that it seems to me that all the rest is necessary for the WP theme to work and keep the various templates and included files look and behave as they are supposed to. You have Google analytics in there, but as a SEO guy, you probably want that. And then you have some 'if' statements which act as a fallback if the site is viewed in older browsers, they are also necessary.

If you are reluctant to start over with VSD or any other programme, I think you should follow Paintbrush' advice and stick with WP.

The outsourcing of your web design work has been mentioned above here somewhere. I would include some example images of sites that you have had designed and created, so that potential customers can find something they like. And one minor thing with your own site: At the bottom, where the background is dark, there is very little contrast between background and text, especially on the buttons that read 'Search engine watch' and 'Search engine land'.

Thank you Inger for taking a look for me. I noticed the meta description was twice and what looked to me to be a little excess coding before my body content. I've had SEO issues with this in the past on projects I come into late.

I'm not overall happy with the design, but I suppose it could be a stronger alternative to explore uploading some custom themes and try to learn a little CSS coding to tweak it. I had some issues with the layout in my last attempt.

I'm in the process of getting permission from my clients to display some work and getting some testimonials/Google+ Reviews. Being young in the industry (28 years old and SEO Certified for just over 2 years), I didn't include wording in my contracts allowing me to display their work. Stupid mistake, I know.

I completely agree with you on some of the color scheme issues. This is another adjustment I'd like to make. I really appreciate the insight!