I want to position everything under drinkcurious.com with the bourbonbanter.com content becoming the blog component/library under DrinkCurious. So i need to take the design approach from DC and overlay onto BB and create a new homepage to match and pull over all existing pages to be built in Ghost for DC.
In my mind this means a new or customized theme that supports the DC design branding and website homepage approach with a blog component that is the current BB site content.
If this is something you’ve done before or can support please let me know. Thanks!
The question you’ll need to resolve is how you’re going to manage these two sites, and what level of relatedness you need.
Easiest: BB lives at bourbonbanter.com or bb.drinkcurious.com – in other words, its own URL. Match the styling of the BB ghost install to the DC site, update links, and you’re done.
More complex: BB lives at drinkcurious.com/bourbonbanter . That’s going to require a subdirectory setup. You’ll need a proxy out in front that figures out based on URL whether any particular request goes to WP or Ghost. You’ll also need either Ghost setup in a subdirectory install (available at Ghost Pro but higher tier and extra charge), or for your proxy to do a whole bunch of URL rewriting. Plus the styling.
Also complex: Set up Ghost to run headless (loses membership benefits). Have the WP site use Ghost as a data source for the blog pages. (Would require custom work on WP.)
The BB site currently has 18K+ subs so that would need to be the core of what I build upon. I don’t want to migrate them over, especially with some of those being paid members integrated with Stripe, etc.
I was imagining a scenario where someone visits drinkcurious.com, they get an experience similar to what they get now with a website homepage (vs a blog homepage). Menu sysmte provides access to existing page structure from DrinkCurious.com and a some nav that goes to a new blog homepage (a new page created to mimic the functionality of the current BB homepage) and nav to category pages like I have now. I would adjust redirects at the domain level so that I don’t have to push the blog content into a sub-directory or other structure. (e.g., Proof of Life: Full Circle becomes https://www.drinkcurious.com/proof-of-life-full-circle/)
I suppose in simplest terms, the user experience is a new homepage experience, DrinkCurious URL and brandinging support applied on top of existing BB ghost stack. Then fix BB domain mapping issues to hopefully not skip a beat.
If this approach is feasible, I just need someone that can help build out the new homepage for my current theme (or modified theme to allow for DC branding), and implement a blog homepage that mimics the current BB homepage.