Global Theme vs Single Pages in Static Conversion

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Hi Everyone

I'm really new to C5 - only installed it all yesterday. I'm more of a graphic designer than a web designer, but I'm pretty familiar with HTML and CSS to give you a bit of background. I've never used a CMS or any kind of database before either. But after some good how to's and vids I have it all set up.

So I'm looking at my default concrete5 website and cruising through the dashboard and menus etc, getting a feel for it all, because I've got a complete html website that I'm looking to convert... and I've got this thought...

MY QUESTION IS: If you have a complete website that you want to convert, is it best or easiest to just put it in one page at a time complete with content (or is this even possible), or do you strip all the content away and make a theme with a global header etc that carries on through the site? (and then go back and add all the content using the C5 interface?)

The video for "designers" on conrete5 is pretty basic, and it doesn't really address how all the navigation works or anything like that. If anyone can point me in a good direction for subjects surrounding this, would be much appreciated. Cheers!

PatrickCassidy
 
adajad replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
adajad
Converting an existing html site into concrete5 is easy but still a bit time consuming.

First I would think about what kind of layouts your theme needs and then follow this excellent How-To on creating your theme: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/designers/making-a-t...

After your theme is up your should set up defaults on your page types. Those defaults will be shown on all pages using the page types and will save you a lot of block adding. You should also, after creating your theme, have one or more Global Areas in your theme which will have a corresponding Global Stack. Adding blocks in a Global Stack will have them inserted on all pages having that Global Area.

Once the theme is created, installed and configured it is time to move your content. Copy and paste your text from your old site into Content blocks. Upload your images into the File Manager and add them using one of the core blocks or extend your installation with new blocks from the Marketplace. Add pages and sub pages using the page types created.

It does take some time to convert an existing site, but it isn't hard.

Good Luck and welcome to the wonderful world of concrete5! :o)
PatrickCassidy replied on at Permalink Reply
PatrickCassidy
Thanks adajad,

I have a html design that has buckets, or custom blocks with backgrounds you might call them which are really just divs with backgrounds and other styles applied.

A good example is this:http://www.templateaccess.com/demos/6157/...

You can see under the nav bar there are different stylings to each div container, how do I translate these across to C5?

I'm just a little confused, because I couldn't set this up as a template, because I don't want all the other pages to have this layout like the home page.
adajad replied on at Permalink Reply
adajad
Please see my answer here (first link in that post is the same as the one above): http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/themes/intergrating-style...