Site redesign from Frontpage. Move to modern CMS?

[NoHarleys]

Okay, so I have a 10 year old site that ranks well for many keyword terms with most search engines. The problem is it LOOKS 10 years old and was designed in Frontpage. I want to update the site using Joomla (or similar) to give it a more modern feel. But I obviously don't want to change things too much and lose my ranking. Here are my thoughts on how to handle this but I'm open to suggestions.

1. Create the new site in a subfolder that contains a few keywords. My current domain doesn't have any relevant keywords in it. So I'm thinking mysite.com/keyword1-and-keyword2/ for the CMS site.
2. Create SEO page names in Joomla that are identical to those in the current pages
3. Create a layout similar to what I currently have while pretty much cut-and-paste text from each page making sure link point to the new relevant pages.
4. Use permanent redirects to the new pages once everything works properly.

The site consists of 100 pages or so which will make it rather time consuming using this method. Which is why I am here; to make sure I only have to do this once and it is the most efficient way and not lose my ranking. It may be worth outsourcing if it isn't too expensive but I'm not sure how simple it would be to convert everything over and still allow me to update it regularly. I am totally open to suggestions.

[jhannawin]

Firstly, do you have any analysis in to why your site ranks well for the keyword terms? Your assumption above appears to be that it is mostly to do with on page content. Dig around in your link profile, you may find after 10 years that you have hot pages for inbound links. Those might be giving you significant benefit and so dealing with them specifically might be better than preserving structure etc.

In my experience with older sites, an organisational/graphical change to a site seems to depress the rankings for a short while, but if the content is well organised and similar 'quality', and the hot landing pages are handled (reproduced or 301'd) the ranking returns. I have no hard data to support that though

[chrisJumbo]

We recently went through a redesign. We went from hand coded pages to a Wordpress powered site. We retained the most popular page names and 301'd the ones that weren't really driving much traffic.

We didn't change too much of the text on the popular pages but added a nicer look and better navigation. We didn't really see any drop in rankings.
cd :O)

[kc412o0yz]

We recently went through a redesign. We went from hand coded pages to a Wordpress powered site. We retained the most popular page names and 301'd the ones that weren't really driving much traffic.

We didn't change too much of the text on the popular pages but added a nicer look and better navigation. We didn't really see any drop in rankings.
cd :O)

I'm working on resdesign for 5 sites with same scenario above and considering Wordpress. May I ask what company you used? I'm trying to get a few quotes/reviews so I can move forward.

[chrisJumbo]

Sure, we used edit[dot]com. There were some hiccups along the way, but eventually things were ironed out and the site was made live. We have been pretty happy with it. The biggest difficulty was actually getting them on the phone during the final phase. Good luck. I would suggest getting some quotes from the pros around here. We didn't because we weren't actually looking at a redesign at the time, but they contacted us. I appreciated that they used all US people and were a small company like ourselves.

[PhilipDunn]

here's a guy that is local to you...
http://www.soleildesign.com/

[NetProwler]

If the site has been up for 10 years, it would have picked up quite a number of decent inbound links to specific pages. You can continue to retain the same URL even when you switch over to CMS like Joomla and Drupal. Joomla has a module called as ReDJ (from Italy) which allows you to use any URL you want whilst Drupal has a module called as GlobalRedirect to do the same.

This way you get to have a redesign of the site and at the same time use the same URLs. Although at the end of this exercise you may still need to do a few 301 for some pages - but it won't be the same as having to do for 100 pages.

[rprzybek]

We went through a similar exercise with our own company website and if anything our search results are even better now. Initially I just cut and pasted each page into the new site and kept the basic site structure the same. Longer term with a CMS it's so easy to go through each page and add further detail (keywords, tags etc.) so your ratings improve rapidly. I have also designed new CMS websites for several customers and they have moved up in searches within an extremely short time because of the improved content that they have been able to introduce. It's all about good content.

[nickoran]

Joomla is database driven, so you can keep all your files with the old template on the site - it wont look ideal, but if you recreate the homepage with joomla, your static pages from the old site will still work. You can then go through the whole lot updating each page.

Personally I would do this on a test site first, get it all up and running and transfer it onto the correct domain.

I would definitely do some keyword research though and check what links you got coming in, you could find that updating the content and adding new keywords will be really good for you, and sometimes its better just to change the domain tor something more memorable or better suited to the site and lose a link or two anyway.

[NoHarleys]

If the site has been up for 10 years, it would have picked up quite a number of decent inbound links to specific pages. You can continue to retain the same URL even when you switch over to CMS like Joomla and Drupal. Joomla has a module called as ReDJ (from Italy) which allows you to use any URL you want whilst Drupal has a module called as GlobalRedirect to do the same.

This way you get to have a redesign of the site and at the same time use the same URLs. Although at the end of this exercise you may still need to do a few 301 for some pages - but it won't be the same as having to do for 100 pages.

This may be the way to go. I still need to look into how this will work since I've never used/installed Joomla so I'm still kinda up in the air on where to install it since it is an existing site. Business gets slow this time of year for me so this will be sure to keep me busy....along with all the other little things on my to do list.

Thanks for all the input everyone.