The time has come
Friends have been encouraging me to get my own web domain name for years, but I resisted because my website had been hosted on AOL for over 12 years - it's linked all over the web. But AOL finally forced me into a split-second decision.
I pulled up my website this evening and found a very unattractive AOL advertising banner across the top of my site. I was not amused. I contacted AOL to find out if this atrocity would go away if I went back to paid AOL service and was told it would not. Half an hour later, I became the owner of ellieseligmann.com.
There's about a 24-hour turn-around time on the setting up webhosting through GoDaddy.com. When that is complete, I will start moving my files and then look for the most efficient way to forward traffic from the old site to the new site. Or maybe duplicate the site for awhile. See, I've been on the web so long, I have pretty decent status with Google. If you Google "voice teacher aurora colorado" - I am the first web page that comes up. I don't want to lose that priority. But that advertising banner on AOL looks SO unprofessional!!! So, the short of it is that I have to be smart in how I make the move to my new domain name. I welcome the advice of those more experienced in these matters.
I pulled up my website this evening and found a very unattractive AOL advertising banner across the top of my site. I was not amused. I contacted AOL to find out if this atrocity would go away if I went back to paid AOL service and was told it would not. Half an hour later, I became the owner of ellieseligmann.com.
There's about a 24-hour turn-around time on the setting up webhosting through GoDaddy.com. When that is complete, I will start moving my files and then look for the most efficient way to forward traffic from the old site to the new site. Or maybe duplicate the site for awhile. See, I've been on the web so long, I have pretty decent status with Google. If you Google "voice teacher aurora colorado" - I am the first web page that comes up. I don't want to lose that priority. But that advertising banner on AOL looks SO unprofessional!!! So, the short of it is that I have to be smart in how I make the move to my new domain name. I welcome the advice of those more experienced in these matters.
posted by DenverSop @ 8:22 PM
2 Comments:
At 2/11/2008 8:14 AM,
Anonymous said…
I can't say that I have any experience in the matter about which you're asking. About your action in general, though, I can say WAY TO GO!
I looked at your old website, and I love what you've done with it. I also love how carefully you stuck to the facts there. The proof, of course, of your reason for making the move condemns AOL from the top of your old page; I saw an ad for Pace Picante sauce, and Christianne and I saw Campbell's soup when I showed it to her.
I agree that the advertising bar is absolutely disgusting. It destroys the layout of the page.
At 2/16/2008 2:48 PM,
GeekTeach said…
Here's the code to place on your old site:
<html><head><title>Redirecting to [new URL]</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV='Refresh' CONTENT='0;URL=http://[new URL]'>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The key line is the META Refresh. The '0' is how many seconds to wait to turn the page. (If you want a page to timeout, you can set this to however many seconds you want the page viewable for.) After the semicolon, you just place the address for the new site.
In most cases, the search engines will recategorize the refreshed page in place of the original page.
You can obviously set the title to whatever you want. You can also set page contents between the body tags - many people place a note saying 'if the page doesn't automatically send you to the new location, click here' or such....
I would recommend adding a redirect for each page on the old site. If you just place one at the top level, people will just get the 404 error and will often go away. And the search engines will just drop the page.
I hope the addition of the ads doesn't break this functionality. It shouldn't if they did it right - but it is AOL :)
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