In redesigning RCI’s website, I’m at the point in development where I need to start thinking about redirecting all the old URLs. Anytime you rebuild a site as completely as we are, you run into the problem of changing URLs. The old site has URLs that will no longer be active, and the new site has URLs that the old one didn’t. But there is similar content on the two sites, so how do you make sure that bookmarks and Google results point to the right place on the new site? You have to redirect.
In this case, the old site was all hand-crafted HTML while the new one is built on WordPress. So any redirection scheme should be integrated into WordPress. That’s the thought I had when I went searching for an easy way to handle the redirects. And I found just the thing; the Redirection Plugin from Urban Giraffe. It’s a WordPress plugin that simply gives you two boxes: the Source URL and the Target URL. Enter those two and it builds up a list of redirects that are active on your site. So you can easily just plug in all the URLs from your old site, and map them to pages on the new site. It’s really a big help on this project; if it wasn’t for this I would have had to build my own redirection system. This frees up my time to actually map out which file should redirect to which, instead of working on the plumbing. Definitely recommended.
