Is my designer taking me to the cleaner?

Converting html site to asp

[5stars]

I am in a dilemma and need some expert advice.

I hired a company to design a custom shopping cart. After months and months of debugging, with one bug fix setting off another bug and a fistful of gray hair as a result… I fired this company and hired another to come in a debug it and get it running right.

They did that perfectly… but from get go they told me the cart would not function to its full potential unless I converted to ASP.

To make a long story short… I decided to take there advice and convert the whole shopping cart to ASP.

I told them I wanted the cart track my conversions on PFI and PPC. They suggested an in house affiliate program with ad tracking. After many many $$$... the cart is done and working great, but they failed to disclose that this affiliate/ad tracking program won’t work on my html pages. Since everything except the shopping cart is in html… this is useless.

Now they are telling me I need to convert the rest of the site to ASP to be able to use the affiliate/ad track and of course they want a lot more money.

I have a couple concerns.

One… is this true that they have to convert the html site to get the tracking script to work?

Two… my biggest concern is that I have a pretty good PR with my.html (which is no fault of theirs) and I am scared to death of how this will affect my PR. What can I expect from the search engines?

My designer wants to put some of the reoccurring part of the site… like the bottom link nav. In an include file but these links contain keyword that have contributed to my site rank. If it’s in a file outside the main file will the search engines index the content as if it were part of that page or will it become invisible?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[txbakers]

If it’s in a file outside the main file will the search engines index the content as if it were part of that page or will it become invisible?

An included file includes all the code from the file into the main file as if you typed it there yourself.

As for the tracking, I know that I use a system that uses ASP to do that, but I"ll leave the full answer to a more fully qualified expert.

[bcc1234]

Use a tracker pixel embedded into html pages.

[5stars]

Thanks for the speedy reply!

I am no programmer so I may be way off, but in viewing the source of my asp pages... it looks like you can embed .html in ASP.

If this is true... can you reverse it and embed .ASP in html?

Hope that doesn't sound to stupid, but like I said I am not a programer...

Thanks again!

[Krapulator]

If their tracking system uses server side scripting then it makes sense that you would need to convert your site to asp to make it work on the non-shopping cart sections of your site. However this is probably a lot easier than you think. You simply rename all of your html files to have an asp extension. Eg mypage.html becomes mypage.asp and then you need to update all of you internal links so that they reflect the new page names eg links to the page above would change from <a href="mypage.html"> to <a href="mypage.asp">. You could then create a simple asp page which contains the tracking scripts and use a server side include on each page that you want the script to run.

From a search optimisation point of view you would probably leave then old html pages on the server for a few months and redirect them to the new asp pages using 301 permanent redirects.

[Krapulator]

>>I am no programmer so I may be way off, but in viewing the source of my asp pages... it looks like you can embed .html in ASP.

An asp page is a html page which also allows server side scripting; it can contain both normal html and server side scripting (such as vbscript).

You cannot embed asp scripts in html as the scripts will not be processed when the page is requeted, it is the .asp extension that tells the server to process any scripts on the page before the requested page is returned.

[5stars]

THANKS KRAPULATOR!

I love this site. Great advice and lots of help! I read a lot and don't post much for fear of exposing myself as a newbie!

But here goes another dumb question... if I convert to ASP... how will it affect my current SE rank? I am normally in top 10 on most of the top SE... Especially Google.

I would hate to loose that... I don't think any affiliate program could generate/replace the traffic I get from Google alone.

Thanks again.

[willybfriendly]

Don't know about M$ and ASP, but with Apache and PHP you could configure the server to run .html through the PHP parser. A solution such as that would preserve all of your links and PR if you did not change the site structure and file names.

WBF

[bilalak]

I think keeping the html is better. You can embed a picture (img.asp) where this asp script would do all the affiliate tracking and finally output a small gif.

This is a better solution not to loose the PR and better than loosing some of their tracking system.

Luck!

[pearl]

I wouldn't consider having a site that's html and not asp or shtml.

You should gladly pay your SEO folks a few coins to convert this.