Global Moxie

Question

I'm moving my existing site into Big Medium; how do I avoid disturbing the current site until the Big Medium site is ready?

Answer

There is inevitably some transition time involved in moving a site into a new content management system, and the last thing you want to do during this transition is show a half-finished website to your visitors.

The solution is create your new Big Medium site in its own directory on your server.

When you first add a website to Big Medium, the setup wizard prompts you to enter the locations of two directories: The page directory and the homepage directory. The page directory is where Big Medium builds all of the files for your website, except for the homepage and a few related files. The homepage directory is -- you guessed it -- the directory where Big Medium builds the homepage.

To avoid interfering with the HTML files of your current website, you should create an entirely new directory for the site's page directory. This will allow you to use Big Medium to build your new website in its own space.

Choosing the name of your page directory

If your website address is www.example.com, Big Medium will by default offer www.example.com/bm as the page directory, but don't feel that you have to stick with this default.

The name of the page directory will appear in the URL of every page in your site, and this is a good opportunity to make your site search-engine friendly. Google, for example, tends to rank pages more highly if they have a keyword in the URL of the page. So consider naming your page directory with a keyword associated with the subject of your site. If you are creating a website for a company that sells gizmos, you might place your page directory here: www.example.com/gizmos

For example, if Big Medium offers you the following default settings...

Page directory URL: http://www.example.com/moxie
Page directory path: /home/example/www/moxie

...then you would change the moxie in these settings to gizmos like so:

Page directory URL: http://www.example.com/gizmos
Page directory path: /home/example/www/gizmos

Home is where your page directory is

By default, Big Medium suggests your main web directory to be the location for the homepage directory (in our example, that means that Big Medium would build the homepage at www.example.com). Although this is probably where you will want to place your homepage directory when you're ready to launch your Big Medium website, you shouldn't put it there just yet or it will replace your current site's homepage.

For now, set the homepage directory to the same URL and absolute path as you set for the page directory. This means that when Big Medium starts to build your web pages, the temporary address of the homepage will be: http://www.example.com/gizmo/

Ready to launch

When you have your Big Medium site ready, here's how to take it live and replace the existing site:

1. In the Big Medium control panel, select "Site URLs and Directories" from the "Settings" menu and change the setting for your homepage directory to the directory where your current website homepage is located. In the example we used above, that would be:

   Homepage directory URL: http://www.example.com
   Homepage directory path: /home/example/www

   Leave the page directory in the same location (www.example.com/gizmos, in our example), and save the settings.

2. Go to "Rebuild Pages" in the "Layout" menu and rebuild all pages of the site.

3. Your new Big Medium site now displays its homepage at www.example.com. Depending on your server settings, however, it may still be necessary to remove your old site's homepage in order for the new homepage to show up. If you still see the old homepage, then you need to remove the old file manually (you can do this via FTP). Big Medium's homepage file is named index.shtml -- remove or rename any other "index" files like index.htm, index.html, index.php, etc.

4. Clean up the old site's files. Now that you've launched your new site, it's a good idea to take the pages from your old site off of the server or at least move them to a new location. Although your homepage will now point to the webpages generated by Big Medium, search engines may still bring people to your old site's pages. It's a good idea to tidy those up so that visitors do not inadvertantly find old info.