It’s not a huge deal to convert a static site design to a WordPress theme; see https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
But you’ve got a curious mix: your page source says WP Visual Composer is being used. So maybe someone exported PHP from VC? And your slider on the home page is Revolution Slider, well known to have security holes in earlier versions. And the account and payment code will need to be adapted to WordPress or you’ll need to convert to WordPress functions for those.
But I don’t want to convert the site to a wordpress theme – I just want to use wordpress to develop the site.
The previous designer is overseas and very unresponsive. He did not have a clear understanding of the client’s needs, therefore I need to redesign the site. WordPress, with it’s plugins and widgets, will make my job infinitely more manageable.
I actually created a new site on a development server in wordpress, but the client said that the security configuration involved such a tedious process that he wants me to redesign the existing site so that those configurations can be retained in place. Is there a safe and relatively easy way to utilize the wordpress dashboard to edit the site?
Sure, you can use parts of WordPress to edit the site; see backpress.org. But it’s much more work and complexity to do it that way than to use WordPress as a whole.
WordPress works with a theme for the designed front-end, a backend – core WordPress and plugins – for editing and management. Use an existing WordPress theme (or build one) for the design and existing plugins to handle the registration and payment systems; that is the safest and easiest way to do things.
I actually created a new site on a development server in wordpress, but the client said that the security configuration
So you must be using a theme now for development.
And what do you mean by security configuration? The payment gateway? If that is PHP, you need to integrate that into the theme – perfectly possible. Or use existing plugins for that payment gateway and the registration system.
What would you suggest as first steps in making the site accessible via the WordPress dashboard? Should I install WordPress into the root directory of the site? Would that do the trick, or do I need to import (I don’t know how to do that)? I’m kind of stuck, and I really appreciate your help.
The new site I began can be found at olivetreedev.olivetreemortuary.com
A site can’t be accesable via WordPress until it is converted to WordPress; that means the design needs to be moved into a theme and the content moved into WordPress via the editors. You can’t automatically import content into WordPress unless it is in a database file or CSV file.
What is wrong with olivetreedev.olivetreemortuary.com ? You started a WordPress site there and have moved some/all the content. When it’s complete, move it to root: see Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex and WordPress Serialized PHP Search Replace Tool
How would I be able to connect the new (wordpress) site to the existing database?
Why do you want to do that? What is the “existing” database used for?
Customer accounts, mostly. I just want to make the transition al smooth as possible for my client, without disrupting his business.
Writing/reading data from an existing database of customer accounts is something that will require custom php work. You can use the WordPress database layer outlined at https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/wpdb And move the relevant tables to the database that WordPress uses. You might be better off exporting the customer data and importing it and using it with a WordPress plugin made for that purpose.
