First of all, this post is only for those of you using a Mac. I’m sure there are a ton of tools out there for PC (because I had to sort through them before finding this one)- but for downloading an entire site for “offline browsing”- or moving files to use in your new content management system, this post is for you.
After a bit of search, I found Sitesucker. It’s shareware, and probably worth a few bucks to toss the developers way. It will download all the pages, images, everything you need to take that awful static site and make it look good in your new WordPress site.
For those of us who try to move clients who don’t know their HTML from their Hosting- it can be a real blessing. Sure, I’d love to have FTP access to a site- but in just a few minutes I’ve got all the stuff I need so the old host can take it down and I can put up the new.
Warning- it won’t help you with flash sites.
It also won’t copy the backend code you need to run a form- or any other cool stuff, but for a reference of what they had, to where you are taking them- this is the tool.
Wget is the classic Linux commandline tool for downloading websites for offline browsing/backup. There are quite a few Windows ports available with Sourceforge (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm) being a safe bet, but a Google search for “wget for windows” will give you other many other versions, plus some GUI interfaces to make it easier for non-geeks.