Preparing for the Big Move

from html to dynamic

[Harry]

Ok. The new site is being created, using a customized cms. That's the easy part.

Does anyone have any guideline to enact the move from html to dynamic.

1-The site is several thousands pages
2-It's has established links
3-How do we deal with the transition period without using redirects?
4-Should an intern manually transfer all the pages?

Thanks

[lexipixel]

I am doing over a large older, mostly static site and integrating some CMS, CSS all around, SSI, etc...

I opened a separate hosting acount and am building the site there (using the numeric IP address) and using all relative URLs, paths, etc in the revision.

I download one "area" at a time, convert it to the new format, upload it to the new server and tune.

When the whole thing is ready, we'll put in a DNS change --- when the DNS updates --- viola' --- the next person sees only the new site.

That's my system engineering site-move advice.

As for making wholesale changes to the site, you need to consider your search engine listings (if that's a factor)... drastically changing the whole site at once, can lose you a lot of ranking. Redirects are bad, old dead links are bad, thousands of "cookie cutter" pages from a CMS system can be bad... lots of bad can happen.

If you pay for search lisitings, no problem, just tell them to reindex your listings... but, if you earned your rankings "the old fashioned way", you will want to be careful to not rock the boat (too much or all at once)... You could try leaving the old site as is, and putting a prominent link on the home page to the new stuff... let that live for a while, then kill off the old pages slowly as the new ones get found.

my $0.02...

[olwen]

Put in a custom 404 script, and track your 404s. For common ones put in 301 redirects.

[ogletree]

Use modrewrite for Apache or an ISAPI filter for IIS. You do not want to lose all your links it is starting over again all your traffic from G will be gone very quickly. Try to match all the old URL's as much as possible. There is evidense that dynamic URL's have less value in G. I know there are some sites our there doing fine but why risk it. G likes to see .html files. It takes longer to get a dynamic site spidered and freshbotted. Unless your are a PR7+ I would not risk it.

[Harry]

Thanks!