New Website - redirecting all the traffic!!

[m_baggley]

Hi Folks,

I have recently 'inherited' an internal website at my workplace that was done using frontpage. The person doing it didn't use any filenaming conventions. He tended to just keep the names as they were (eg document 1 edition) so there would be gaps in the http address etc. He also did this for word documents and the links have been emailed out to people.

I want to redesign the site using dreamweaver (which I am just getting used to) and what I want to do is find a way of listing the most important web links that he used and redirect them to mine
example
first important document used (his version which creates % signs!)
document_1 (my version) shorter and no % signs

Is there a way of doing an all encompassing redirect? I've tried looking in the Javascript websites but can't find anything that I could use. I do use CSS stylesheets if I could use them?

Please help!!

Matt

[ronaldb66]

I don't understand what it is you are asking for; do you want to redirect visitors to his current site to the new version? Are you looking for a way to update all links in your new version automatically?

[m_baggley]

.... what I mean is that the website will be in the same place and a lot of the pages or documents (content) will not change, but the http address will change as the current versions are rubbish! So I wanted to try and redirect the old ones to specific pages that are up to date.

Does that make sense?

Matt

[tboss132]

Load the site into dreamweaver, then click on the site menu and use the options
"check links sitewide" and "change links sitewide".

[ronaldb66]

Wait up.
You mentioned building the new version in DreamWeaver; after you've imported the current pages as a new site in DW and all the links to the "old", remaining pages are established, you should be able to change a page's name with DW asking you to update all the links to that page for you.

The nice thing about DW is that is does that sort of stuff, saving a lot of time; still, recalling the kind of markup certainly older versions of FrontPage churned out I fear you'll be doing a lot of rearranging those old pages anyway; in some cases it might even be more efficient to build them from the ground up, cutting-n-pasting text snippets from the old pages.


Wait a minute, tboss132; did I just miss your post, or are you simply a faster typer...? Oh well: what he said, and in less words.

[m_baggley]

Hi,

Unfortunately given the differences in the old version (frontpage) I am having to build it from scratch using my new CSS sheets and the corporate branding that I have to use. So that still leaves me with the same problem doesn't it? Or am I being really thick.

Along with building it from scratch, I won't be keeping the same filenames. So say for example someone looks at an email and uses a link on the email to go to a page, it won't be there cos I've now renamed it. How can I redirect them from that?

Matt

[mcdougals4all]

I have recently 'inherited' an internal website at my workplace

Depending on what type of server is being used you should be able to create redirects that essentially say "if the old page is requested, go to the new page instead."

It's simple enough with PHP, but again depends on your set-up.

[whizard]

you could set up a custome 404 page that redirected users based on the requested page... that would be hard, but it would work if you renamed the new pages just like the old ones, but just took out spaces and replaced with underscores, or something like that, that was consistent across the entire site, and the (psuedo)code would say "replace all %20 in request with _ and forward use to new address". Of course this would screw up any legit 404 errors...

Dan

[Spookster]

Your best bet is to probably just throw up a 404 page for everything saying this page has been moved or is now gone and then after a few seconds redirect to the main page of the site.

[m_baggley]

Okay, I guess I need to find out how to do that now! Thanks very much for all the assistance. I would have thanked you earlier but I moved house and don't have internet yet!

Thanks again

Matt