Space Pirate
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
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I'm looking for advice on how to handle a web domain for a client (more of a charity case, actually).
I recently helped a lady out with a website for her small business selling jewelry. She had an existing website but couldn't do sales from it. Her webmaster seems to know what he's doing, but she's a techno-boob and they didn't have a good relationship. He controlled her domain name (see: techno-boob) and once he understood that she wanted to move away from him he offered to assist with transferring it to her control (charging for his time, naturally). He told her that he was getting out of the web design business, so in my mind there was no problem. During the time when I began building her a Squarespace site he was unavailable to do the transfer because he was sick with Covid. So in her haste to get up and going she opted to get a new domain name, so that's how we set the site up. And now here's the question. The webmaster is available again (glad he made it) and ready to do the transfer. She's wondering if it's worth the bother / expense. In my mind she has an establish domain that previous customers recognize, so I think she should pay him to transfer it to her control with the Registrar I set her up with, and so I'm looking for input here from others. If she does agree to do the transfer, I know that I can point the domain to her Squarespace page, but I need to figure out if there's a way to do it in a way that issues a 301 so that over time she could retire the old domain (if she wishes). Anyway, I'm puzzling over this myself and will come to some conclusion soon, but any input from the gang here would be appreciated, thanks! ... |
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¡Damned!
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
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I know there's a way to add domains and set a new one as the primary, but there's a weird window where the site may be down for an overnight or more. If she absolutely cannot be down for any reason, I'd duplicate the Squarespace site, set it up with the preferred domain and let both run for a bit before redirecting the less-preferable domain to the new site. Then she can take the old site down and redirect the url at the registrar level.
So it goes. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
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Namecheap will let you create a 301 Redirect response for domains. You could transfer the old domain to Namecheap and set up a 301 to the new domain there.
https://www.namecheap.com/support/kn...-for-a-domain/ I'm guessing most registrars support something like that. |
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Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472 Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
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Before you make any changes you need to know what is going to happen with the old domain. The least number of changes the better.
What might be best is to change the Squarespace domain to a subdomain of the original domain so once you have control of the old domain you can have it point there (ie store.olddomain.com) I'm not up on SEO at all, but the more you change now the harder it is to reestablish I'm sure. If you just redirect to the new domain I'm sure the end users would understand given this client isn't likely a major name that more would be concerned about the domain change... Then again, people might have the old site bookmarked. Personally, I would use the original domain name and just have the old webmaster set up the subdomain to point to your Squarespace hosted site. Then transfer the domain to your control. Of course, you'll have to keep her store at store.olddomain.com for SEO reasons from there. Of course, if the old webmaster is agreeable for the migration, he could just point the A record to Squarespace and you change the coding for the original domain name. Have the new one redirect to the old one and pretend it didn't happen. I think that last option is the best really. However that depends on how agreeable the old webmaster is. Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it. |
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