Conversion from P7 Dreamweaver to WordPress

You might want to consider converting your websites from Dreamweaver to WordPress. I was having too many issues with P7 code and resulting DW site structure, including slow load and content layout shift, my SEO was low, low, low, so I decided to begin converting my Dreamweaver site to WordPress.

The conversion from DW to WP seems manageable but not easy. In a nutshell: copy existing page content into empty WordPress page, then style it. There are many steps required to make this happen. I'm new at this, learning slowly, so don't look to me for expert answers -- ask AI, like I've been doing. But here is a summary of my workflow so far

This transfer needs to be done as a "manual" build, not some magical bulk import of existing DW pages as they are.  Because of the non-compatible P7 coding, the first step is stripping out all that coding from your pages and produce simple HTML versions of the page content, which can include basic paragraph structure and H1,H2-type headings. Remove all other code.

This is not a detailed instruction manual, but a sketchy outline of a process I have just begun that seems to be working.

1. Create a WP site on your host server -- I'm using Hostinger, but many others are good for this.
2. Then make a csv list of your existing pages, one csv for parent and one csv for child pages, just a list of pages names, not content. Use your sitemap as basis for finding those pages.
3. Import those csv lists into the empty WP site, using an import plugin like WP All Import.
4. That should create a series of empty named pages, arranged in Parent-child relationship.
5. Strip all code out of your existing content pages, except basics of p, H1,2,3,4,5, and bold.  I created an AI prompt that does that for me, one page at a time, see it below.
6. Populate a few of your new empty pages with that clean content to create sample pages for testing.
7. Create style and structure for those pages. Basic WordPress can do this using their Gutenberg block editor process and free themes, but there are thousands of helper themes and plugins to make it easier.
8. For help creating that structure, you can install various themes and plugins. I chose Astra for themes and Spectra plugin for styling pages. They both come from the same company in free versions, but I opted for Astra Pro, about $70/year, and the free version of Spectra.  https://store.brainstormforce.com/ The company has a lot of instructional videos and help pages.
9. However, that’s as far as I have gotten, just getting started.
10. My site has 300 pages and 3,000 images, so this is going to take me a month or two, if not longer. Of course, my existing site is still on-line and I’m building the new WP version off-line. Then when it is done, I launch the new site with my existing url.
11. Then create 301 redirects to send viewers to the new pages. This is especially important if you have changed parent/child structure of pages.

Following is the prompt I use to tell AI to remove all P7 and other unwanted code from my existing pages. I use the prompt, followed by the web page with the complete html of the page, from header through content to footer, all of it.  Each of the major AI sites were able to process it well, producing a page with some html for page format and content.

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First, preprocess and clean the provided HTML as follows:

Remove ALL Project Seven (P7) elements, including any divs, scripts, stylesheets, classes, IDs, or wrappers starting with or containing: p7, hmy, mxm, qgm, amm, dmm, stt, tk, zeit, or similar P7-specific naming.

Remove ALL layouts, grids, sections, wrappers, navigation menus, headers, footers, sidebars, scroll-to-top buttons, and any non-content structural elements.

Remove ALL video-related elements: any div class="video-wrapper", div class="tk-video-wrapper", iframes (especially YouTube embeds), and any surrounding containers for videos.

Remove ALL image elements: any img tags, figure elements containing images, picture elements, and any divs or containers that wrap images.

Remove any text that serves as an image caption (typically text immediately following an image or contained in figcaption tags).

Remove all scripts, styles, meta tags (except charset if present), links to external CSS/JS, and inline styles.

Remove any Google Analytics or tracking code.

Strip all classes, ids, inline styles, and unnecessary attributes from remaining elements.

Preserve only the main editable content (the part that was inside the "Document body" or equivalent main content area).

Then, convert the cleaned main content into valid WordPress Gutenberg block markup.

STRICT RULES:

1. OUTPUT FORMAT: Begin with the extracted title and description in this exact format: TITLE: [extracted title text] then DESCRIPTION: [extracted meta description text] then a line with three dashes. Then follow with the Gutenberg blocks.
2. Use ONLY native core Gutenberg blocks (wp:paragraph, wp:heading, wp:list, wp:list-item, wp:quote, etc.). Do NOT use columns, group, cover, image, or any layout blocks.
3. Use exactly ONE wp:heading {"level":1} block for the main page title (H1). All other headings must be H2–H6.
4. Convert h1–h6 tags to appropriate wp:heading blocks.
5. Convert p tags to wp:paragraph blocks.
6. Convert ul and ol to wp:list and wp:list-item blocks.
7. Do NOT create any wp:image blocks. All images have been removed during preprocessing.
8. Preserve the exact original text content and order. Do NOT rewrite, summarize, add, or remove any text.
9. Do NOT add any extra blocks, separators, spacers, or styling.
10. Do NOT include any HTML comments except the standard Gutenberg block delimiters.
11. Output the title and description first, followed by the clean sequence of Gutenberg blocks — no other explanations, no extra text, no surrounding html or body tags.

HTML TO CONVERT: