Complete site re-design

What are the does and don’ts?

[Ant_C]

After seeing the benefits of having a well coded site that validates on my latest project, I have decided my main ecommerce site that I made two years ago with FrontPage needs a complete re-design.

The original site is full of messy code, 100’s of validation errors, has never done that well in google for our main keyword and looks dated. Despite this we have a lot of inbound links and do reasonable business through it.

What should I look out for when making the new site and switching over to the new one?

Will the search engines see it as a new site and of less importance?

Is it important to keep the same internal link structure?

Thanks

[Gibble]

I wouldn't necessarily keep the same link structure, but I would try and have inbound links still get to the proper pages through proper redirects.

If it's not ranking well anyhow, I wouldn't say you should worry about what google thinks, there might be short term pain on the google front, but you have to think long term.

my .02
-C