Forum Moderators: phranque
in the "early days" (around 1996) I coded our webpages by hand and didn't care much about the site structure. Some 1-2 years later, I switched to semi-auomatic and later automatic site generation tools. Now for the last ~4 years I stayed with the same tool, taking care that the site structure remains consistent but at the sime time has some sort of logical ordering. I had mixed success with that strategy. I would say about 75% of the site is more or less consistent and structured - the rest is unfortunately a bit chaotic.
However, I need to switch my CMS in the very near future. I don't now yet what CMS to chose (I have a different thread running on this and would value your opinion and advice) - but whatever I chose, I guess I can restructure the whole site - if necessary.
So here's my problem:
- Should I just copy the site structure as it is, thus remaining link integrity for bookmarked or spidered pages?
- Or should I embrace the opportunity and at least re-structure those 25% of chaos, or even the whole site?
- And if so, how do I deal with bookmarked pages and search engines?
And the $1.000.000 question:
- How do I prevent myself from becoming "chaotic" again? Are there any techniques on how to forsee the unforseeable, i.e. how to design and structure a site so that I still can react pretty swift to new challenges without creating havoc in the site structure?
Any help would be appreciated!
Mybe you can point mo to an area where there's more discussion on CMS going on?
