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Most of these sites have an index.htm or index.html as their home page.
These are static sites so I don't have to worry about up to the minute content changes or dealing with a live database.
THe issues I'm trying to get a handle on are:
1. I'm not sure, but I don't think I could easily install Joomla in a folder to get the site developed and then move it to the root. I would think that would mess up the URL structure if you are using search engine friendly URLs. Even if I were to do that, there would still be the issue of which side the content is on.
2. I suppose you could put the site up on a sandbox or development server on the web, develop most of the site, and then do the migration
3. Another option might be to run a local server running apache for develpment, then migrate from there.
4. I had thought about running the old index.htm and joomla's index.php in the root. Make sure that the server is set to run the Htm or html index first. I can then work on the joomla side by www.mysite.com/index.php. As I do pages, I could do a redirect for each page to the appropriate Joomla site. I do see a couple of problems with this
-- I think It will confuse the search engines a bit
-- Once someone goes from the htm side to the joomla side, I need to make sure that it is clear as to how to get back to the original home page.
I do realize that changing the sites over will probably have a negative impact on the SEO rankings for at least the short term.
I'm tending to think that option 4 is the way I'll go simply because of resources. I'll try it out on one of my existing sites rather than on a client. It also seems like option 4 would allow me to work on the migration over a period of a week or so if necessary. The users would be seeing two different interfaces on the site but that would only be for a short period of time.
I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.
thanks
cg.
PS - I just thought of something else. If I can leave the old index.htm up and also have the joomla index.php running, I should be able to mark the content, categories and sections as 'do not publish'. I could wait till the end and then try to publish everything (which seems to be a bit of work) or I could work on one section at a time and then publish that when it is complete.
I give my clients a login account so they can view it.
I moved a 12 year-old static html site to Joomla 1.5 last year and didn't really miss a beat with search engines. The site is PR4.
I took care to 301 redirect main stuff. Tried to keep category names the same, menu structures the same, etc. Content copied over tried to keep the same file names (URLs), titles, ect.
I was prepared for a big Google hit but was quite surprised the site started doing better right away. The previous site had never had meta titles or meta descriptions or any SEO attention (it's a Non-profit).
