11 Exporting to another system
At some time, it might be required to transfer the content of a site to another content system.
A site's content might need to be transferred to another content system because the content has become too large for Smallsite Design to reasonably accommodate, or that it has to be merged with an existing system, or simply a decision to use another system. For whatever reason, such a transfer present problems, and they usually centre around incompatible internal formats between systems. That is further compounded by that those internal systems change over time, making automating the process difficult. There is no universal content transfer format for sites.
Automatic ingestion of content from another system is only going to be successful if it can identify entities in the exported file, and can convert them into entities in the importing system. That is far from guaranteed as some elements may not exist in it, and so would likely be mangled, which may happen even to standard html entities like tables. Any such difficulties would require the services of someone expert in the importing system to resolve them. How long that would take is not predictable, which is why large scale web migration projects often run substantially over budget.
So is there any reliable way to transfer the content? Yes, but it may take time, but does not require expertise. Every web content system produces pages, and every element on the page can be individually selected, so a table cell's contents can be selected. A link's text and its target URL can be individually selected. As long as they can be pasted into similar elements in the target system, the process is predictable and does not require expertise. Some training in how to put that content into elements in the target system may be required, but that is limited.
Where an expert's input may be required is in how to express some elements that are unknown in the target system into elements it does. But once that is established, that process can be done by someone of lower skill once they are familiar with it. Most content in Smallsite Design sites will be paragraphs, so should not be a problem for most unskilled people with a little instruction. Most other elements are text based as well. Images can be dragged to desktops and their files can be imported into the target system. Other media may require special processes to extract.
No matter what the source or target systems are, the general process is to display each page, and cut-and-paste each element's content to the screens in the target system that are used to input into the equivalent elements in it. Multilingual sites will require opening each page in each locale, and procedures will need to be displayed in
Diagrams and sequences may not be able to be expressed in other systems, so some alternate form of presentation of the content will have to be devised, even if it is images and videos.