You're wise to check this out. Some of the content management systems do not write out search engine friendly URL's 'automagically'. I don't have experience with many of these, but the one we use for one customer is Drupal. We can configure the system to write out urls that are acceptable and friendly to the search engines.

If you have a very big site, sure a cms is excellent to have. Have you asked why a cms is recommended? Is your site very big with high maintenance needs?

Be sure to search webmasterworld for more info about content management systems. There is a stack of info and it helped me a lot when we made the Drupal decision.

Thanks calicochris....

The site is large, about 2k pages so it will be a major help to have the CMS in place. I think that Jer the programmer mentioned that the URL's will remain remain search engine friendly -

the programmer mentioned that the URL's will remain remain search engine friendly

It's not just that they need to be search-engine friendly, they also should be the same URLs as the previous pages on the static site.

If this is absolutely impossible, then you must ensure that you are using a 301 Permanent Redirect from each old page to the equivalent new page. Even with a 301, you will probably experience problems which could last several months.

MAKE SURE THE URLS REMAIN THE SAME! Otherwise all the links to those pages will count for nothing and you will be starting over.

ensure that you are using a 301 Permanent Redirect from each old page to the equivalent new page.

About a year and a half ago I had to change several hundred URLs when I converted two sites to run on directory management software. The above 301-redirect strategy worked fine for me in Google. I kept the new page content and structure as close as I could to what had been on the old pages, and within a month Google was ranking the new URLs where the old ones had been, give or take a couple of rankings. Yahoo was much slower to sort things out, though.

If you have to change URLs, don't just depend on the 301's. Make sure every link within your control is updated to point to the new URLs, and also track down as many links as you can from outside sources and request that those be updated as well.

Tell each webmaster exactly where to find the link that you'd like to have updated, don't just announce that the URL has changed and expect them to hunt for it. The easier you make it for others to do what you want, the more cooperation you'll get.

thx this helps alot. Do you guys have any commentary on using CSS vs. content managment system, pros and cons?

I don't think it is a 'vs' issue. Every cms depends on a css to define the look and feel of a site. So, OK, you can build a site with a cascading style sheet alone, and there are many excellent sites showing great css skills.

For me, it is more a matter of what does the business of your website require? Again, with a cms, the content is usually easier to update and it is easier to manage masses of content.

I have one customer with a huge site. She needs to move to a cms, but she hesitates - slow adopter. In the mean time .. if any changes or revisions to her content comes up, every person in our small company runs away ... There comes a time when the content becomes just to much to be managed by anything else but a cms.

Style sheets manage style and visual issues. CMS's manage content.

If your site programmer is a *programmer* - PHP or perl - and is suggesting a CMS, he/she can write the code to not only create compliant documents, he/she can also write those documents to static files, no URL change or redirects required. You store the data in a database, yes, but each time you add or update a page - write a file.