Opinions and Experiences!

[Jade]

Just some opinions and experiences would be appreciated....

Our main site does not use Actinic, it uses another ecommerce cart that unfortunately has its limitations, which is why I want to change it to Actinic.

I have tested the waters with Actinic for the last nine months with an additional site of ours that is now just starting to rank ok ish for some of the products it sells (similar product base to our main site)

I have now rebuilt our main site with Actinic, but I am really hesitant to upload it (terrified actually!!), as I do not want our main site to disappear from the Google rankings. We rank well for the major search terms for the product we sell (i.e. top of page 1 on Google) and I obviously really don't want to upset that.

My questions are these (and any input at all would be greatly appreciated).....

1) What experiences has anyone had with overwriting a successfull site with an Actinic built site

2) Have your rankings gone down ? or possibly even up ?

3) Has anyone encountered any pitfalls that they wished they had thought of before !

4) Has anyone got any advice at all !!!



Any thoughts, ideas, experiences very welcome

[Duncan Rounding]

If your URLs will change then you must set up permanent redirects from your old pages to your new pages. There 's lots of information around on how to achieve this but it will depend on the URL structure of the old pages.

[Jade]

Thanks drounding.

I intially thought I could just make the page names the same but of course everything in Actinic is within the 'acatalog' , so that wouldn't work.

The main site is quite basic... built with standard HTML in Dreamweaver with 'add to basket' code built in for the e-commerce provider.

I was thinking of 301 redirects...would this be sufficient and foolproof do you think ?

[Duncan Rounding]

301 redirects are permanent, so yes. If your original pages are the same name except without acatalog then you should be able to do that will an .htaccess file, presuming your on a linux server.

[Jade]

Yes we are on a linux server.

I have a .htaccess file set up at the moment, which redirects a few old pages to their new pages (nothing major)

Would I need to add a redirect for every site page or is their some way to globally redirect the same page extension names to the 'acatalog' directory ?

Additionally the current site pages have a .htm extension, whilst the actinic pages of course use .html - Would this make any difference to any kind of global redirect I could do ?

[pinbrook]

I would redirect every page, so product A page on old site is redirected to product A on new site and so on.

It takes longer but you will place all your visitors on the page they want rather than just forwarding them to your site where they will need to start searching.

also do a 404 to pick up anything you overlook

[Jade]

Thanks Jo.

You are probably right...more time consuming but more accurate for the customer.

Is it good practice to leave the old original pages on the site or delete them as soon as the redirect is running ?