Should I Redirect?

[myrrh]

I am the webmaster for my church's website and I am rearranging the structure of the site.

I don't know how many of our users have pages bookmarked and I'm trying to decide whether to redirect those pages I am moving. I suspect not many users outside our church community have our pages bookmarked, so I am wondering if I should just let everyone find their way around once the updates are complete.

Should I go to the trouble to redirect? I've never used redirects so I don't know what is involved.

Is it a situation that it's so easy to do that I might as well go ahead and do it regardless?

[bill]

You remember the old adage "Cool URIs don't change [w3.org]"? You'd be negligent not to provide those redirects. You never know who has bookmarked something.

We have a ton of threads dealing with 301 redirects [google.com]. That would be a good place to start.

[phranque]

have you studied the traffic (using analytics or log files) to see how visitors are arriving at the site?
is there lots of referred traffic? search traffic?
what are the entry pages?
how many pages?
what type of server?

these are all important questions that should be answered before you make a plan.

[myrrh]

Most of the site re-design involves moving folders up one level to eliminate an unnecessary folder like this:

Now: www.example.com/unnecessaryfolder/widgets/mypage.html
Change to: www.example.com/widgets/mypage.html

Is there a way to us .htaccess to redirect all pages in a folder to their respective filenames in a different folder?

(I did search for an answer to this but came up with no answer I could understand.)