I am about to embark on migrating a really great website from Apple iWeb to RapidWeaver.
The current site performs very well with organic searches on google.
I want to make sure it performs equally well when rebooted under RapidWeaver.
I don’t have any plans to change the main site URL name.
I am planning to host it with the same company (Network Solutions)
Is there anything I should be paying attention to as I develop the new site?
My current plan is to completely rebuild the old website and launch it for testing purposes under a new website name. My goal here is to keep the original site up for as long as possible while I come to grips with the nuances of RapidWeaver. When the test site seems to be working without hiccup my plan is to take down the original site iWeb site and replace it with the RW site.
I have been reading what I can about migration issues. Some of it is way over my pay grade. I am not a developer per se. I am merely a subject matter expert who needs to have a website for my subject.
One of the things I read about was to, if possible, use identical page URL descriptions for existing content that’s going to be reused.
QUESTION: Does Rapid Weaver provide any ability to modify the URL of a particular page
QUESTION: Does Rapid Weaver provide the ability to create a 301 redirect for pages that can’t be found with the old URL?
QUESTION: I am guessing that the heavy lifting is going to be getting the site from iWeb to Rapid Weaver.
Are there any other considerations I should be aware of to recreate a RW test site into a primary RW site?
Can anybody direct me to more discussion about this before I start the process.
When you say URL for a page, you can name the page (folder name) to anything you would like, limited by web naming standards (special char, no spaces, etc).
That’s more of a “hosting” issue. 301 redirects usually occur in the web server, not on the web pages. Many hosting companies have cPanel controls for this or what is called an htaccess file(Unix Apache type web server).
I never used iWeb, but Rapidweaver is probably going to produce a much more modern responsive site.
As for building the plan to build a “new website name” and then switching over, you need to care that you don’t get Search Engine penalties for having duplicate content. If the new site is strictly for testing and learning rapidweaver than you would want to prevent search engines from indexing the test site. There are a number of ways to achieve that, when you get closer to publishing someone here could help you out with options.
You could also first get all of your files from your “old” site into a folder and reuse those for your “new” site if needed. You could do that with: SiteSucker.
Texts I recommend copying from the site if you need to.
Or if you want to give the URL, if you don’t have or want to get SiteSucker, someone could do it for you…?
Thanks for the heads up about Search Engine penalties. That would never have occurred to me in a million years. I will make sure I learn more about indexing issues prior to setting up the site. Have a new computer coming in a few days so will be launching this initiative soon.