Throwing in the towel temporary.

Shuting down a website to restructure

[lgn1]

Somehow we found ourselves more dependent on Google, than we thought. We had a diverse source of traffic, however Google was converting the traffic into sales much better than other means. In other words Google was bringing in the targeted traffic, and the buyers.

Our problem is that we had a dynamic site and thus only the home page was being indexed. We had enjoyed top 10 Google listings for over 5 years, except for a few weeks during the Florida Diaster of last November. All that changed in mid september, and everything we try won't get us listed again.

Its going to require a major rewrite to convert our site from dynamic to static, and we need to add lots of new content, as our suppliers are doing a major revamp of their product line.

I was thinking of leaving the home page up, during the transition, just in case google decides we are worthy of being in the top 10 results again.

However any links from the home page will goto a 404 redirect indicating that we are temporary shutdown for two months.

I just don't want to be bothered with the day to day operation of the business for 2 months. I want to spend my time, making sure that I don't put all my eggs in one basket again, and to expand the site. Google Adsense on the home page will pay the lights, power and rent for the buisness during this transition. I plan on puting the phone on temporary disconnect, so I am not bothered by phone calls.

Anybody ever close temporary, to reorganize and restructure, and concentrate all their energy on revamping a web business.

[Essex_boy]

Temporary shut down indeed Id lok at other ways of being able to run the company rather than rolldown the shutters.

Money obviously isnt a problem so why don yo have temp come in once or twice a week to do the orders etc maybe hire a phone answering service to take your calls, I wouldnt just shut down.

[netguy]

I agree with Essex. It is better to limp along and maintain your five-year-old site 'as is,' and concurrently work on your new static design, rather than walk away from it and have to start all over in a few months.

Steve

[lgn1]

I guess the big thing is, this is our slow season, and everything we tried, to motivate the customer has failed. We do 90% of our sales between Jan and September. The customer is just not buying in the last quarter. We tried free shipping, promo offers, everything. Our conversion rate is 2% the first 9 months and 0.3% in the last 3. And for some reason those 0.3% customers are what we politely call 'high maintenance'. Rather Frustrating.

Next year I will probably expand also into something that is non-seasonal, or is popular in the last quarter at least.

At this time of year, we actually lose money by staying open, but its only 10 weeks to christmas, so
I think we will slug along until the new year, and the new static web site.

[isitreal]

If I read you correctly, you don't need to shut it down, what you need to do is change the internal linking system to standard, non query string based URLs, then use mod_rewrite to change the site urls back to query strings for your dynamic engine to process.

This is how almost all major dynamic sites do it, it's not that hard to do, a few tweaks of the url gererator in the site programming will do it.

[PatrickDeese]

Isn't there a mod rewrite fix that can make dynamic URL strings into static urls?

[lgn1]

Can't use mod_rewrite, Our ISP is using IIS which does not support mod_rewrite amongst other things.

[plumsauce]

what about iis rewrite then? the simple version is free. supports regex. you just need to convince the isp to install the isapi. sometimes this is the hardest part.

or, search for an old thread where i explained doing the same thing using default error pages in asp.

or, leave the site up, take down the phone number and disable the cart.

[lgn1]

I tried the isapi and the other one linkmod or something and the ISP will not install these.

I almost feel like going with another ISP, however over the years our application has got so complicated and has so many interlinking dependencies, that its hard to find an ISP which will meet all your specifications. To make it worse, most ISP's don't have a clue on the impact of various actions, and just have policies like no holes in the firewall except port 80 or 8080, and you can't convince them that by making the firewall hole IP specific, especially if the party at the other end is setting up the same way, to create a two-way trust.

Somedays, I feel it is best to setup our own server so I can install what I pleased, and I will make the security judgement. However its nice to let somebody else worry about 99.9999 uptime, offsite backups, and other diaster recovery issues.

[SuperLite17]

Depending on your site coding language here's how it's done with asp/asp.net. This might help point you towards a solution?

This is placed in the global.asax file:
<code>
Private Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
'Querystring Rewriter
Dim context As HttpContext = HttpContext.Current
Dim oldpath As String = context.Request.Path.ToLower()

'Rewrite Paths
Dim token As String = "/virtual/mysqlnet"
Dim i As Integer = oldpath.IndexOf(token)
Dim len As Integer = token.Length
Dim id as String
Dim Newpath as String

If i <> -1 Then
Dim j As Integer = oldpath.IndexOf(".aspx")
If j <> -1 Then
id = oldpath.Substring (i + len, j - (i + len))
Newpath = oldpath.Replace (token + id + ".aspx", "/default.aspx?page=" + id)
context.RewritePath (Newpath)
End If
End If

End Sub

</code>

This rewrites the URI as default.aspx/mysqlnet/page1.aspx