Moving servers

As I get ready to upload my new website, I am also switching servers at my ISP from NT/Frontpage to UNIX. Really not a big deal for a site that is strictly HTML (except two guestbook pages, which the ISP will set-up with CGI scripts). Well, it is a big deal because now my root directory file names need to be “index.html”, not “default.htm”. Why is this a big deal? There are a lot of links to my site (especially from search engines) pointing at what will be a non-existant page.

To keep new visitors, I created a “redirect” page that will automatically link them to the index.html page instead Not a big deal (uses a “meta-refresh” tag to do it). The other strategy would be to make duplicates of the index page, renamed as default. That’s not a bad strategy either, except it is harder to kill-off these links to what should be dead pages. Search engines don’t like to index pages with “meta-refresh” tags, or so I hear, so eventually these pages should die off.

I am concerned about people hitting my “home” default page. There I may make a duplicate of the index page. There is just too much traffic there. Maybe I should do this for a couple more of my most popular entry pages, just in case.