301 Redirects and MS FrontPage

Does anyone have a workable solution?

[Rx Recruiters]

OK, I admit it - I use MS FrontPage to keep my websites updated. That being said, I have yet to find an easy way to 301 redirect the non-www indexed version of my site to the www version. Maybe I'm being stupid about this, but everyone I've asked has told me something different, and I have actually tried all of them. Each time, when I change the .htaccess file, it has resulted in corruption of the FrontPage extensions, and I've had to wait on tech support to reset the reload the FrontPage extensions, then re-upload the sites to the servers.

It got to the point where my hosting company (Hostway) said DO NOT TOUCH THE .HTACCESS FILE! WE WILL DO IT FOR YOU! I think they were tired of talking to me. Guess what, they did the same thing, and my site was down for a day. Finally, they gave up, and sent the following e-mail, which put it back in my hands I guess. I don't think they wanted to responsible for screwing up my sites again. Here is the e-mail they sent me:

Hello,

There are several ways to run a redirect.
Since you are using Front Page, using .htaccess will conflict with Front Page extensions, potentially corrupting them.

You have several alternatives for redirecting visitors.

Redirect in ColdFusion
<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

Redirect in PHP
<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http:// www.new-url. com" );
?>

Redirect in ASP
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "
http:// www.new-url. com">

Redirect in ASP .NET
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://w ww.new-url. com");
}
</script>

If you decided not to Front Page extensions, here is an excerpt from a Hostway article called, "Trouble Shooting CGI Scripts".

The URL is:
http:// help.hostway.com /documents/linuxplatform/WebHelp/linuxguide.htm.

Hostway does not offer support for .htaccess modifications. The following examples, however, will work on our systems. You can find complete documentation at:

http:// www. apache. org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
http:// www. engelschall. com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/

WARNING FOR FRONTPAGE USERS: Any modifications to your .htaccess file may result in the corruption of your extensions and, as a result, may make your site inaccessible. You should create a backup copy of your .htaccess file before making any changes to the .htaccess file.

I e-mailed MS about it, and they don't seem to have a clue either. I just got a form e-mail back thanking me for my comments, and that they would check into it.

My question for the board is: Is there a uncomplicated way of accomplishing the 301 in Frontpage, for a FrontPage edited site, without totally screwing up the server extensions?

I have asked several developers to give me a price quote on doing it, and one said $30 to $45 to do it (but he wasn't exactly sure on how to write the non-www to www redirect, since it was the same domain name - and when he tried, my site got caught in an endless redirect loop for about 8 hours, during which time the main page was "down" again. The other developers I asked were clueless as to what I was talking about. Anybody got any suggestions on how I can do it myself, or please sticky mail me with a price quote if you think you can do it.

Please don't give me a suggestion if you haven't actually tried it on a Frontpage site running Frontpage extensions, I've tried enough of those "fixes".

I wonder why other search engines don't have problems with the 301 and 302 redirects and dup content?