The original Morris Ring website was built and managed by John Maher, a former member of Bristol Morris Men. Following his sad loss in 2011, the Morris Ring officers decided to have a new website built so that it could be maintained by a number of editors, backed up by professional support.
With over 200 pages to transfer to the new website, each requiring careful checking for relevance and accuracy, a plan was put in place to get the new website up and running as quickly as possible with the key pages in place. The remaining pages would be transferred by a small team of volunteer editors, each working to a timetable according to their availability.
Legacy pages
During the transfer phase, the original Morris Ring website was transferred to a 'legacy' location. This was to allow access to information for those performing the transfer, and also for anyone that needed to access this information before transfer was complete. These legacy pages were labelled so that it was clear that the information therein was potentially out of date, and each had a link in the footer to the page you are reading now.
Once all of the 'legacy' pages are transferred, they become redundant and will be removed for good.
Search engines
To ensure that search engines gradually drop reference to the old pages, a series of automated redirects have been put in place so that most seaches will lead users to the pages of the newsite. An instruction has been put in place to ensure that the search engines do not continue to index the old pages.
Broken links?
These redirects will also ensure that most links to pages that no longer exist at their original address are routed through to relevant content on the new website. Finally, any link that is not picked up will be routed through to a page advising the visitor of this fact (rather than display an error message).