[WEB4LIB] web site redesign

[Raymond Wood]

On 27 Jun 2001, at 7:54, laura kortz wrote:

> My library is in the process of a Web site redesign.
> We've decided on the top page and internal page elements (nav bars, graphics,
> etc.)
> 
> Our current site consists of about 800 pages. About 600 of these will be
> converted to the new format. What I'm wondering is if any of you can give me
> advice from your experience of the best (most efficient way) of transferring
> content from the old templates to the new. Also, when you're making these
> changes do you have the newer stuff on a separate server, etc.
> 
> Any advice greatly appreciated.

I recently automated a similar web site migration to a new look and 
feel using the Perl scripting language combined with Regular 
Expressions (Perl is a cross-platform scripting language BTW i.e. it 
works on Linux/Unix/Windows/Mac).  I wrote the script to basically 
grab the content 'chunks' from the old site, then dump these into a 
new template format.  The script was applied to approximately 400 
web pages and seemed to work quite well.

Note that the success of the above approach increases in direct 
proportion to the *consistency* of the coding/formatting/layout of the 
pages you are trying to migrate.  In other words, the more consistent 
the look and feel of the original web page coding, the easier it is to 
isolate the relevant content you need to migrate.

My $0.02,
Raymond
--
"Freedom is no longer available for free."
  (recent 'newspeak' from ZeroKnowledge Systems)