OK After further reading on the subject, I have come up with three different ways to redirect my old url’s to the new ones

HTTP-equiv refresh
.htaccess
301 redirect

My host tells me that it would be simplest for me to do the HTTP-equiv refresh

Although this seems to me to be the easiest way to go, will it be perceived by Google and others as some kind of hanky panky?

Several years of web building and still a newbie.