Website migration

[mozllo]

hi,

I have to "refurbish" a website from scratch.

This domain is quite old (2004) and has got a good audience.

1/ Is there a tip or a tool to guess with witch kind of framework (cms) is it  made from ? I mean drupal, joomla, ezpublish, wordpress ..as i can't see it from code source.

2/ Have you got any method to migrate the old database (seems to be iis with asp language)  into a new one  (i work with php mysql) ?

3/ In order not to loose rankings in Serp, is there a tool to list the main urls with best link juice ? I will then  redirect them with a 301 redirection in an .htaccess file.

Many thanks..

[perfectweb]

If the current site is built on asp the credentials to access the database must be stored somewhere within the application. It would usually be in a .config file. There is a small chance that the connection details would be encrypted - but in the days of ASP this was the exception to the rule. If you can find these connection details you will be able to get at least a read only view of the database and export the data.

I find it strange that the owners of the site (whether that be you or a client you're working for) don't have the connection details of the db.

If you really can't get db connection details then yes, scraping the article and importing into the new db would be the best way forward. Screen scraper basic edition should suffice for this (it's free) - http://screen-scraper.com/download/basic_choose_platform.php

[mozllo]

Tks for your reply...

If i don't have the credentials to access database, i can't have a look at it.

The only thing remains to scrap articles from the site and to import them into the new system, isn't ?

[mozllo]

To Baptiste Placé

1/ Tks for the tool !

2/ What do you think about regarding software solution ?

3/ Ok for open site explorer.  For listing all url indexed in google i can use the command site:www.domain.tld and see which  one have good audience  ?

[perfectweb]

If the site was built 7 years ago, and has had no work done on the programming side since, there is a good chance the database is not up to scratch and has lots of dirty data (not for sure, just a good chance).

There is also a good chance that it was created with a custom CMS rather than one of the more popular CMS's so bare that in mind when trying to work out which one was used.

If I was faced with this situation, and I knew little about the old system, I would do the following:

• Investigate the database structure/schema and what data is stored where
• Create a new database and application to support the new website
• Migrate old data across from the old database to the new database using SQL export and import scripts

Once you have the new site up an running (in a test environment) you can think about how are going to redirect pages by using tools like opensiteexplorer to examine the most linked to URLs and then use urlrewriting (rather than redirection) to do the mapping (i assume the new site will be on the same domain).

[Goetzman]

I agree with Baptiste's direction, was looking for a site like built with

[baptisteplace]

1 - A tool that may give a hint : http://builtwith.com/

2 - Being a coder will help but it may take time to understand the old database. Software solution may exist but are probably not free.

3 - You can use opensiteexplorer's top pages, but if you have a developer to make the database migration, he will be able to create a redirect script to have ALL pages redirected to the new url