Redirects: Telling the digital world you've moved
Clients with an existing site they're moving to SiteFarm are understandably concerned with preserving visitor traffic analytics and providing a seamless transfer to avoid confusing people using established URLs and personal bookmarks. Having a deeper understanding of the layers involved with your Redirects will assist you in take the necessary steps to configure all options appropriately.
Drawing an Analogy
Let's liken your need to move an existing site into SiteFarm to this scenario:
Nathaniel Smith has recently married and he and his spouse, Jane Doe, decided they wanted to hyphenate their names, so he's known officially as Nathaniel Doe-Smith. At the same time, they're moving into a new apartment to start their life together. He needs to make sure all his mail is forwarded to his new address.
Let's see how this translates when we look at your site.
Nathaniel |
Your Site |
| Address Update | Update the UC Davis campus host clerk |
| Nathaniel needs to go to the post office and fill out a mail forwarding slip to let them know where to send his mail now that he's changed residences. | Contact the campus host clerk to let them know of your site's change of location and, potentially, change of domain name. This would mean telling them where you currently live: Ex.: mysite.ucdavis.edu and then telling them where to direct people to find your new location: mysite.ucdavis.edu CNAME mysite.ucdsitefarm.acsitefactory.com |
| Change of Name Update | Update Site Factory - Domain Associations |
| While at the post office, Nathaniel also needs to let the post office know it's okay to send mail to the the address if it's to the following names he's known by: Nathaniel Smith-Doe Nathaniel Smith Micheal Smith John M. Smith Keyser Söze |
You, or a member of the SiteFarm team, will go to your site tile in Site Factory and use the Associate Domain section to list all the domains that will be directed to this new location. This will include redirects, CNAME, and aliases: mysite.ucdavis.edu myoldsite.ucdavis.edu myreeeeallyoldsite.ucdavis.edu |
| Filing System | Redirect Domains |
| Nathaniel is a very organized guy, and he sets up a brand new accordion file to put his older mail that would have gone to his old names [Editor's note: insert storied past involving the CIA and clandestine missions] into an appropriate folder so he can find it again easily. | Users with the Site Builder role, or a member of the SiteFarm team, can enable the Redirect Domains module AFTER your site has gone live. This module will let you reference specific pathways from your associated domains and direct that traffic to an appropriate location in your SiteFarm site. myoldsite.ucdavis.edu/importantstuff becomes: mysite.ucdavis.edu/research/importantstuff |