Customer Experience Strategy – Aligning business goals with customer needs

It had become quite clear to me for a while now that the services and the customer friendly nature of WordPress was a far smarter option in terms of a CMS for experiencecurve. I had originally dreaded the thought of this migration and as such had put it off for quite some time, seeking instead to improve the way in which I was working with Movabletype. Eventually however the lure of WordPress was just too strong in terms of increasing the UX and so I got prepped and began to make the change. 

I am very pleased to announce that this migration was, contrary to what I had previously believed, absolutely effortless, and here is why it was so easy. 

Tools 

The majority of this migration was done using a wonderful online tool from Carthik, which I used in order to get all of the key areas of the website transferred across such as categories, entries, all archives and even the comments from each piece, something which I actually thought may present me with some problems. This tool also gave me a step by step guide to putting together a redirection script which was built into each archive that meant the permalink worked just as they should, and finally sending a 301 to the search engines in order for them to know that this was a permanent move. 

Easy Migration 

If you are looking at making this change then I’d also advise you to use the MT redirection tool which I was able to find with a quick Google search, there are many available which all do the same job. Basically this tool is a Movabletype template which you paste in your MT, which then replaces your entire individual archive template. To be honest when you first do this it can bring forth fear that you’ll lose it all, but honestly it worked like a dream.  

I knew that WordPress was the right move to make and given that I was able to complete this migration without so much as touching a button when it came to PHP was mighty impressive. 

The old website does still exist actually as I believe that it will take some time for the search engines to get caught up, nonetheless every nook and cranny of the old website can now be found on WordPress without so much as a broken link of a confusing pathway. 

Customer Experience

WordPress just offers the best UX bar none and it has much more capability and optional extras than MT was able to offer. Small annoyances which I had in the past are now gone and I feel infinitely happier with the ease of navigation and the overall look and feel of the site now than I was before. 

If you are dreading this move then you really shouldn’t, it is much easier than it first appears.