I hope kitz does not mind my post but please delete if you need to sorry
No not in the slightest - Thank you. The structure of the site means there are a lot of external factors to consider and there isnt an overnight solution.
Still not 100% sure how Im going to proceed as regards to either paying my hosts to manage some of it or using let's encrypt... but there will likely have to be some sort of proxy because of forum images etc.
John is one of the few who knows it is under progress, as with him being in the hosting business himself I had asked his opinion on the best way to proceed with this a while ago.
He is also aware of the development work going on behind the scenes regarding making the main site responsive. This is a massive project - there's 100's if not 1000's of pages if you include all the .php dependencies.
There's only one of me, not helped by the fact some days I find it difficult to type so you can imagine how slow coding is.
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I have looked as various CMS even installed a few and thought I was going to use Joomla, then found MODX may be better. Installed MODX on my server.. started trying to build the front end... then realised because it was all database driven I have a massive problem when it comes to some of the site urls and naming... and it is not going to work well with certain pages such as the broadband checker.
So back to the drawing board and using a template system. Thought I'd found something whilst it will let you add pages to a single template system, it doesnt manage templates (re updates!)... but hey it was 'cheap' at under £100 , but then I found it broke all php <?> tags. Luckily I found that out before I'd progressed too far and paid for the full version.
If the site was new then starting using something like MODX or Drupal would be the way to go. (That in itself is a learning curve).
But it isnt - and there's about 14 years of content with a custom built back end system. There is no easy way. Its not a WP type site which works well for blogs, but certainly does not for tutorial type things which needs a proper menu navigation. There's far too many pages already indexed with search engines using static urls rather than "php?page=1". There's also the subfolders eg
/adsl or
/routers issue to be overcome.
So I'm spending quite a lot of time at W3C and having to do my own grid layout. They grid layout is almost finished. I have a menu system that works. Next will be transferring all content pages to W3.CSS responsive. That in itself could take time as it will have to be done a page at a time. When that is done, then the new site can be launched as https.
[Moderator edited to correct a minor typo.]