Restructuring Menu's

[mhilger]

Hi all I am running my site on Wordpress using a slightly modified them from Studiopress on the Genisis frame work.  I am extremely over my head but alas until I get some revenue SEO and Design are all on me.  I do not know HTML or CSS but I do follow directions well (unless you ask my wife).

Disclaimer out of the way I have some questions.

I would like to change up my menu's to be more on the line of

Products | Services | About Us | Contact Us | Blog

Listing various direct mail pieces under Products, Sevices and so on and so forth.

I wonder does this mean I will have to figure out how to write 301's and other complicated things or can I just make the changes.  I think but might be wrong that this will change the URL's.

Any advice before I mess this up would be greatly helpful.

My site is http://www.roiautosolutions.com.

If you want a few laughs about the car business read the 2 most recent blog post, anything before that and my writing style is pretty boring.

Thanks,

Mark Hilger

[Aran_Smithson]

Hi Mark,

If I understand correctly, you want to change your menu structure, which in turn will change th subsequent pages?

If the menu changes are going to result in page names changing (im talking filename changes) then yes you may want to 301 redirect the old pages to relevant new ones.

301's are not complex, but can cause MAJOR issues if not done correctly. There are a number of plug ins for Wordpress that ma help manage the 301's check out

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Also, you may want to read up on HTaccess and 301's, but I would not recommend tackling your HTaccess until you KNOW what you are doing.

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Hope that helps a little.

Good Luck!

Aran

[KeriMorgret]

If you haven't tackled this yet, I'd suggest the Redirection plugin for Wordpress for IF you need 301s.

I've only used Studiopress a little bit, but I imagine it has some features similar to Thesis. With Thesis, I can change on the fly what pages I want in my menus. The pages themselves (their contents and URLs) don't change at all, I'm just choosing to now have "About Us" shown in the menu and not show "USS Iowa" in that menu.

If my husband adds a new page to the site about flags for our ships, but forgets to put it in the products folder, I can edit that page and the Redirection plugin automatically creates a 301 redirect for me. Likewise if I make a typo in the page name and don't catch it until after the URL has been created, I can change the URL name and the Redirection plugin automatically creates the 301 redirect. This paragraph applies to any WP install with that plugin, doesn't matter the theme you're using, just make sure that option for automatically doing the 301s is checked.

Does this help at all?