Need advice for redoing an existing site

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Need advice for redoing an existing site

chabbs

12:40 am on Oct 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

This week I purchased a website that gets thousands of visitors a day. The problem that I'm facing is that the site needs some work and there are a couple of thousand pages with different css pages and no template, a little messy really. I'm planning to move the site to a CMS program so that I could easily manage the pages, but I don't want to interupt the traffic that comes from the SEs.
I was thinking that I would slowly redo the pages and then 301 redirect them to the new pages, but with close to 2000 pages that could take some time.

I need some advice on this, maybe a few ideas on how to go about doing this in the best manner without affecting the traffic too much.

I'm looking forward to hearing your replies, thanks.

BeeDeeDubbleU

7:47 am on Oct 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you retain the original URL's (pagenames) you should't have any problem.

shallow

9:35 am on Oct 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm still reeling from redoing my site and it only has about 600 pages. I had no idea of the time I would have to put in. I don't have the skills so hired someone to build the templates for the CMS system. If you can do the CMS yourself, you'll be much better off than I who have gone from web designer (using a web authoring program) to form-filler-inner.

My original site wasn't really messy but navigation was becoming difficult and it was becoming more difficult to manage. And pagenames needed to be improved!

Traffic dropped between 10-20%. Plenty of 301 redirects were used. Initially, clicks (and therefore income) from Google and Chitika dropped dramatically. I had the web developer reposition links and ads. Now the site is doing much better despite the drop in traffic which, I believe, will take a couple of months to get back to where it was. Page rank is gradually coming back.

So be prepared for a lot of work, some possible drop in traffic and income. But in the end, you will have a better site. My site is much better than it was.

Was it worth all the time and money? I honestly don't know. Will probably have a better idea a year from now.

shallow

9:46 am on Oct 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

<< but with close to 2000 pages that could take some time.

I figure it took me at least 1500 hours to add content into the CMS, but part was that I had to redo a good number of the 1000+ graphics in my site. I also rewrote/improved a number of articles.

Part of the time included communications between the web developer and myself, learning to use a very quirky text editor, and the like. But most of the time was just the plain, unrelentness monotony of adding content.