Transferring Content after Redesign

Forum Moderators: mack

Message Too Old, No Replies

Transferring Content after Redesign

What's the best procedure?

Maynard

2:24 pm on Jan 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

Our site is being redesigned. It is a popular site and has many links to it. I plan on transferring content to the new site myself and most pages will have new URLs.

I intend on transferring the most important pages first to the new design and keep less important pages linked to from the old site for a little time. This means, for a time, both old and new sites will co-exist. For external links into our site I will have redirect scripts.

In time the entire site will be the newly designed site and the old site will be deleted.

Is this the best way to proceed in transferring content from old to new site? What procedures have YOU followed and why?

Maynard.

Slade

3:09 pm on Jan 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

If your site is large enough that you're going to be spending time (more than a day) transferring content, you should look at some kind of content management system(CMS). Using a CMS you can make future changes to structure of pages without having to update code on every page.

If you're hip with a web programming language, you can roll your own to pull from flat files or a database fairly quickly. If you've got the time, you can look into some of the prepackaged ones.

Maynard

3:50 pm on Jan 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

Thanks Slade for the input. We're not in the position to look for a CMS at this moment, but will next year. And our existing site is static HTML pages. Maynard.

mack

5:57 am on Jan 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Site revamps are always a nightmare, especialy when there are a lot of pages with static content. The last time I undertook this sort of tast I ended up re-building the entire site on local machine and uploading fully when finished, so in effect to upload an entire new site. In your case you mentioned some modifications to the directory layout. If you are on an Apache server then you might want to look into htaccess redirects. This will ensure visitors and spiders to old page locations are directed to the correct pages.

A site with a mix of old and new layout might give out the wrong impression. From a users point of view it is also better to have uniform pages throught your site.

Mack.

Receptional

6:48 pm on Jan 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

We just managed this process for a client of a web design company, with good success.

I am not the clever techie in the company but what we did was to map ALL the filenames on the old site onto the nearest equivalent we could find on the new site, using an error 301 (which Google recommends). Do it right and Google updates like a dream, as does anyone who had previously bookmarked an old page. We also took great care over the error 404 page so that if we missed anything the user would at least get something sensible.

It wasn't a cheap exercise, but without it the client would have crucified his web developers when a successful business suddenly died for no obvious reason.

I would highly recommend this technique.

Dixon.

g1smd

6:40 pm on Jan 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

If you can't do a 301 redirect from the old site, then simply put a link on each of the old pages, a link that points to the equivalent page on the new site, and put a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> tag in the <head> section of every page of the old site. Google will update from that in about 4 to 8 weeks too.