| Often websites are overhauled or redesigned to offer more content or a better design.
But if yu're not careful, sometimes these changes can cause websites to lose business. When you or your website
designer overhauls your website, make sure the old web pages still work. Or, they at least point to the new pages
that replace them. Let's say you redesign your website. You (or your website developer) come up with a new site plan that involves renaming your different website pages. One of the old web pages on your site was "marketing.html". But with the redesign, that old page was deleted and was replaced by the new page "sales.htm". That old "marketing.html" web page may have been out in the search engines for years, linking potential customers to your website. Well, that old web page address is still out in the search engines. But now when prospective customers find that link in a search engine and click on it, instead of linking to your website they get a "Not Found" error because that web page no longer exists. (One way to find which of your website pages may have been indexed by the search engines is to go to Google.com and enter your web address in the search bar. Then click on the line "Find web pages from the site". Google will list all your web pages that they currently have indexed throughout their search engine. If any of those pages no longer work, you'll need to re-activate them.) Here's one way to correct this problem and get those potential customers to your website. What you'll need to do is re-create that old "marketing.html" webpage (and any others that may have been replaced). Then you'll want the page(s) to automatically re-direct visitors to a current page on your website. Instead of adding content to these revived web pages, they'll just need special coding in the meta tag portion of the web page that people don't normally see. Create a new blank web page and save it as "marketing.html" (or whatever). View the source code of the page. At the top of the page in the source code you'll see the heading information for the page that appears between these two tags: <HEAD> </HEAD> In between those two tags you can add the following line: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=page.htm"> Substitute either the address of your new web page ("sales.htm") or the address of your home page in place of "page.htm" (but don't lose the quote marks). Then upload this page the same as you did the new pages. Do this for each of the old web pages. Now test each of these revived pages in your browser. Enter www.yourdomainname.com/marketing.html, substituting your domain name and the correct web page address. It should now automatically redirect you to the desired webpage. And your prospective customers will now be getting through to your website! |
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