Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We are now re-working the site and have decided to go with css generated by php so that we can keep the content new and plentiful.
My question is this: we have about 250 existing static html pages that will no longer be used, should we just remove the html pages from the server and then use 301 redirects?
Should we be redirecting to the new pages (ie france.html becomes france.php) or to the index page?
Finally, does anyone feel that moving to this type of system (css via php) is a bad idea?
thanks in advance.
using mod_rewrite and setting your server to parse html pages as php, you can keep your existing page names but still have all the benefits of dynamic content. that way you won't take any sort of hit in the search engines, because you won't have to wait until any renamed pages are indexed!
search for 'search engine friendly urls' and 'parse html as php' - with a bit of trickery, you never need change your page names again, regardless of the behind-the-scenes trickery you use.
must read [w3.org...] - "cool uris don't change"
good luck!
W3C: File name extension. This is a very common one. "cgi", even ".html" is something which will change. You may not be using HTML for that page in 20 years time, but you might want today's links to it to still be valid.
In the long term an URL such as domain.com/france is the way to go, with no file extension. Whether they are static pages or dynamically generated, mod_rewrite will allow the same URL to last indefinitely.
I would imagine a 301 redirect from domain.com/france.html to domain.com/france would be safe enough.
