Questions on Building a New Site with Existing Site that is Live

[rdubill]

I am fairly new to developing websites with a prestashop built ecommerce template.

But I just completed my first one and I do like it's features and functionality. I now am much more comfortable with the tools and will stay with purchasing prestashop based templates in the future.

The site I just completed - https://pilotflighthelmets.com - was fairly easy since this only contained about 60 products.

What also made it much more easier is I had complete access to the "old" site - that is - the "old" site was not an ecommerce package so by having access to all the pages (I use Dreamweaver CS6 for this) I was able to keep that site up and running while I develeoped the new one.

The new site prestashop based ecommerce template was installed a directory names "/dev" by Template Monster and all I had to do was move this template to the main root directory when I completed it (all on the same host - Bluehost).

I then just changed each page from the "old" site to redirect to the new ecommerce packages pages to not lose my google & bing index rankings of those "old" pages.

Worked great!

My next project will be much more of a challenge and this is the reason for my post.

This site is ecommerce and is currently hosted by Network Solutions using their ecommerce package. Therefore I of course cannot move this to my new host which will be Bluehost.

This is a much larger site - approximately 750 products and about 1000 web pages.

I will use Bluehost again since Template Monster guarantees whatever ecommerce template I purchase from them will run without problems on Bluehost - they will not guarantee that if I host on Network Solutions.

The name of this site is www.tigerperformance.com.

What adds to the complication is when I started building this site Network Solutions required I use a subdomain to build with their ecommerce package - and that site name is store.tigerperformance.com.

So 95% of this site has pages indexed in google & bing with the domain as store.tigerperformance.com versus www.tigerperformance.com as the prefix to every page.

Our results have ranked high so I of course do not want to lose this as I build the new site on Bluehost with a completely new template. I also will not have the issue of having to use store.tigerperformance.com as a name preceding all the individual pages.

Some of my thoughts and questions I need help on:

1) can I leave www.tigerperformance.com and store.tigerperformance.com still hosted on network solutions and develop the new site on bluehost? Possibly in a subdomain?
A subdomain did cause some issues on my first site since many of my internal links contained "/dev" in the link - had to find and fix all of them. This would be more of an issue on the news site with 1000 pages to be concerned about.

2) If no to #1 - can I have the new template from template monster installed on my local PC (localhost) and develop there? If yes - how painful and what is the process to eventually move it to bluehost and go live after it is complete?

3) What is the best way after it is live to redirect all those google & bing index records to the new pages on bluehost?

Thank you so much to anyone who can offer assistance and may even have been through something like this...

[Scully]

almost like reading a book ;-)

 

my basic recommendation: develop everything under your new hosting service, preferrable with a test domain. when finished:

 

change dns from your old server to the new one.

change the domain in prestashop backoffice to your new domain.

 

don't use a subdomain for test setup!

why not? if you have to build manual links, they all become invalid after moving from sub to main domain.

[rdubill]

Scully - is your recommendation to purchase a completely new domain name?

 

thanks

[rdubill]

ndiaga - here's my summary:

 

1 - recommendations on the best way to keep an existing site live on a one host while developing a new prestashop site on a new host?

 

2 - best way to redirect google & bing search results records to the  new page names on the new host/

 

Thanks

[Scully]

i'd recommended not to start setup with a subdomain. instead you could start with a local server / xampp or with a test domain.

[rdubill]

Scully - that is the way I'm leaning - just set up & develop with a local host.

 

How painful to eventually go live in that scenario?

 

Is it as simple as just copying the files up to the new host?

 

thanks

[rdubill]

Ndiaga - any recommendations on redirecting all the "old" pages indexed by google and bing to new pages (about a 1000 of them - with a different domain name?

 

thanks

[Scully]

Testing on local host results in more effort before going live. It also has some culprits in the sense that you are using a different environment for testing than the one later on in production. Hence my recommendation to use a real domain and switch over the the old domain or an existing shop, once testing has been finished.

 

Testing on a subdomain is good if you don't touch tpls with manual / fixed coded links and if you check your top horizontal menu or html everywhere where you can enter links. and do this before switching to production. I have just seen to many broken links because hard coded somewhere.

 

- manually added to the main menu (which is still easy to find)

- hardcoded in tpl

- hardcoded in php

- manually set in category or product descriptions or short descriptions

- a virtual (empty) category just used for redirect via htaccess (which took ages to find out)

 

Once you have spent hours in searching for all this kind of links others have "managed" to hide somewhere, you'll know what I mean.