Renaming Pages

[garysgal]

Okay, I'm integrating OSC to look like my site... here's my dilemma - I have sooo many paid advertisements, search engines, etc., that search for my main page (.../index.htm) - do I "redirect" to the main OSC page for a while until the search engines adjust? I don't like that idea... I assume it's not possible to rename the .php page to a .htm and basically "replace" my old site (leaving the other "info" pages for the links on each category)...

 

Also, sort of a side note - I have a nice drop-down menu going horizontally across my site - is there a way to integrate this into OSC, or at least change the categories to be horizontal instead of vertical?

 

TIA!

[Guest]

I bet that the paid advertisements really don't reference yoursite.com/indes.htm, rather simply yoursite.com. Web servers have a configuration file that gives them a list of file names to choose for an index page. Notice that if you have index.html, index.htm, index.php, index.jsp all in the same directory, that if you browse to yoursite.com your web server will only display one of these files. Which file it chooses depends on how it's configured.

 

If this is a hosted server (as opposed to your own equipment) then try renaming index.htm to index.htm-bak and see what happens. If the advertisements, search rankings, etc _really_are_ linked specifically to the index.htm file, then you can put a meta refresh at the top of the page to send them to the new page.

 

You can also use .htaccess to redirect requests from one page to another page. I've read several times that a 301 redirect from your new page to your old page will do a better job of preserving search engine rankings.

 

-jared

[garysgal]

Ah, Jared, you're right... don't know what I was thinking... early Sunday brain lapse.

 

Do you have any input on my drop-down menus, or you think I should just shelve the "prettiness" and go with the functionality of the product listing of OSC?

[Guest]

Search the Contributions area for drop-down.

 

Here is one of the results: http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...earch,drop-down

 

-jared