Complete Site Redesign: Will it hurt me, I'm scared?

The Plan

So I have this website: Nevada DUI Attorney as you can see, and if you take the time to run it through the w3school verfication, like some smart alek did 2 years ago when I had just uploaded it, you'll see it is god awful poopy bad. I've tweeked it to be better, but ... yeah, it's terribad. Soooooo, I have decided, in my great and powerful wisdom, no snarky remarks about my wisdom, to completely redo the entire website, into DRUPAL.

Why?

Becuase the wysiwyg program i now use is so rife with errors and horribleness that I can't even SEE the html. If I try to go to the HTML tab, the entire program crashes and shuts down. Seriously I have a twitter widget embedded on one page that I cannot even remove. *sigh* Do you feel my pain?

So the question is, will this migration hurt? Will all my links be broken? Will my google rank fall out of the stratosphere?

Yes, I plan to try to keep all paths the same. However, if they cannot be kept the same, would redirects make up for it? As I understand it, a .htaccess file, can be placed in front of the site, and I can make say http://www.lasvegasnevadadui.com/detection.html redirect to [for example] a new http://www.lasvegasnevadadui.com/laws/detection.html right? As I am going, I see that I had been trying to put the detection page under the general Laws page category, but my currect wysiwyg placed the link as http://www.lasvegasnevadadui.com/detection.html with no laws page in between.

Mind you I am testing the links on my localhost first, and fleshing out the entire website here first.

 

I don't know about the google rank page, but you should be able to do this while keeping the same paths, it's essentially just redesigning and I've done it countless time on sites.

I think a new design and new (better and more standardized) coding will be a lot better than what you've currently got. Personally I wouldn't say that's a very professional page for a lawyer and would make me question hiring from that site (no offense).

WYSIWYG editors are horrible. They suck and I say this from experience. I used Dreamweaver when I first started learning to code and always, always, always I would make it and check it only to find errors everywhere. It got to the point where now I only use NotePad to code websites because I can do it by hand and I know it works.

 

So the question is, will this migration hurt? Will all my links be broken? Will my google rank fall out of the stratosphere?

The answer to that is definitely not if you have you do it properly. Potentially in Drupal you can have the same URL structure or use htaccess if you want to 301 them.
With the use of regular expressions (regex) in the htaccess you can forward (301) users from one page to a new page such as you have described

 

Maybe I should be asking if a 30-50pg website is even justified to be migrated to Drupal, or should I just put up my own html/css/php and be done with it? Thus, ensuring that all the paths remain exactly the same?

 

If you want to use a CMS then it depends on 1. Are you going to regularly update it? and 2. Do you plan to expand the site in the future? Both or either of those scenarios would mean a CMS is the ideal solution otherwise just code it from scratch.

 

Yeah, I don't know where my head was at even posting that i might not use a cms. I plan to do A LOT to the site and I want to be able to pop out many pages, quickly once my plan is set in motion. So let's continue with the original question.

 

Why Drupal? It's not really the best way to go about converting a static HTML site into a dynamic site. Why don't you try with WordPress? I've done some massive lawyer sites recently and they perform great.

 

I would also recommend WordPress as your platform. There are many more plugins and templates available for WordPress compared to Drupal.

One other item I would suggest addressing are the ads. If you're running a service that people will pay for, why does your website need advertisements to stay on-line? I would re-think displaying ads at all.

 

sorry wordpress is not a CMS. wordpress is a blogging application. it acts like a cms, but it isn't a cms at all. it's like saying a canoe goes in the water, but if you want 200 passengers a canoe just won't work at all, now will it. thanks for your suggestion though.

Just for a bit of insite what I'm planning:
- lawyers can sign up and have their own advertised full spread page
- i can sell legal documents on the site
- people can sign in and submit their cases in a very lengthy questionnaire / form
- it will carry a blog
- it will carry a news feed direct to the local courthouse

All of this while handling very large traffic.

@the people who were advising that drupal can keep the same url structure thank you. I just have to get used to the /node/% structure and understand what the path will look like.

 

Don't scare! Best CMS - is your own CMS.

 

HAHAHA you're right Podnimator. but ... sheesh .... I never thought about doing a CMS for myself though. For a client sure, but myself ...