So you’ve just designed a new version of your website and are thrilled with the way it has turned out. It’s looking fancier, the graphics are cutting edge, and there’s a veritable wealth of new features and functionality that wasn’t there before.

Before you delete the old version of your website you might want to consider a few things to do to make sure that the whole switch-over runs nice and smoothly and doesn’t upset any of your potential visitors with missing pages and incomprehensible “404 not found” messages.

Redirect Seamlessly!

This is probably the most important thing you can do when you upload your new site. If you’re completely changing the structure and your old often visited pages are being renamed to be search engine and user friendly you should make sure to redirect the old URL’s to the new location. It’s an incredibly simple exercise and should only take a few minutes.

1. Create a .htaccess file. You can do this by opening a notepad and saving the file as .htaccess. This is the filename and the file extension, so make sure it’s not called .htaccess.txt or something like that as it won’t work.
2. In the .htaccess file add a rule for each changed page. For example:
   Redirect 301 /old_page.html http://www.yourdomain.com/new_page.html
3. When you’re uploading your new web site, make sure to upload the .htaccess file to the root of your web site and you can happily delete the old pages knowing that when a visitor follows an old link to the deleted page they’ll be seamlessly redirected to the new page.

Please note that the above instructions are for a Unix/Linux/Apache based server. If you’re using a Windows Server you need to do things slightly differently. You can find instructions for a 301 Redirect for Windows here.

There are lots of other handy redirection things that .htaccess can accomplish, and if you’re interested in reading more, we recommend checking out this article over at Web Weaver.

Prepare for Everything!

So what if you miss one of your page redirects, or what happens if a visitor just types in the wrong address by accident? You really don’t want a potential web site visitor turned off by a horrible and bland server-generated 404 page.

The answer is to create a custom 404 page to which your wayward visitors will be redirected in case of errors.

Once again, for Apache users .htaccess is our friend. With one simple line added to your .htaccess file you can ensure that your visitors will get a friendly looking custom 404 page.

1. ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

This system is simple, allows you to customise the look of your error page to your hearts content. We suggest you should at least include the following:

• An apology note explaining that something has gone wrong. There’s no point blaming anyone!
• An email link allowing the visitor to email you about the error if they want.
• A search box, allowing the visitor to search your site for what they wanted originally
• A link to your sitemap.

As a test, you can see what happens when you try to go to a web page that doesn’t exist on our website. We’re not saying this is the best way to lay it out, but hopefully we have a friendly looking 404 page that will invite the user to have a look around the site:

http://www.pixelapes.com/not-here/this-page-does-not-exist.html

If you’d like to get more involved with creating 404 pages, we recommend checking out the following article from A List Apart:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/perfect404/