how do i redirect home page (storefront)

[snake1264]

Hello,

So basically i have 2 seperate websites. I have my normal website which I use as my landing page for my products (ex. www.mywebsite.com.) and through this main site which has all my product information people can add items to the cart and are then taken to my miva merchant website (store.mywebsite.com). Both sites are hosted seperately. My question is: How can I make it so that the homepage on the mivamerchant site (the storefront aka store.mywebsite.com) redirects users to my main website homepage. I want to do this since I dont really need mivas storefront homepage, because I just use mivamerchant for the checkout process.

Thanks

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

I know you aren't asking this, but to be honest, it would really be a good idea to have your home page and your store on the same domain.

[snake1264]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

well they both are on the same domain. They are just on different servers, since im a mivamerchant chase customer I think I dont have a choice but to use their host.

[nottheusual1]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

You can put a javascript on the storefront page that redirects to the home page:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://www.whateverpage.com/"
//-->
</script>

And do everything you can to make sure you don't have any internal links pointing to the storefront page. We do the same thing and it hasn't bothered our SEO in any way we can tell.

[titus]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

well they both are on the same domain. They are just on different servers, since im a mivamerchant chase customer I think I dont have a choice but to use their host.

Hi Snake1264. I just wanted to chime in and let you know that technically, they aren't on the same domain. One is on example.com and the other is store.example.com. This can bring up cookie related issues.

Also, you don't want to do JavaScript redirection if you don't want to see any SEO hits. That's going to only work at the browser level, and only if they have JavaScript enabled. You can put in a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, or if you want to get clever, you can use the PCINET Tool Belt to issue a 301 header from the SFNT page to redirect to where you want. This cuts down on the .htaccess processing.

I'd do a bit more digging to find out what the case is with the Chase Payment Gateway. Ultimately, keeping everything contained within one content management system is ideal, because it's going to allow you to have uniformity. This way if you make stylistic changes, and structural changes (category tree, nav bar, etc), they'll be reflected natively through Miva's engine.

I've worked with sites where they were set up similarly to yours, and as the site grows, the cost of maintenance grows. Sooner or later, you have to start making decisions about what is feasible to add to the site, and the trade-offs get larger. In all instances when I've worked in this situation, when the site reached "critical mass", meaning, it was costing more to maintain and add new features than it would to recreate the site from scratch. The site was scrapped, and a new one was created.

I know most of this isn't what you were asking about, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say something. Depending on the set up, this is the type of thing that can end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars in wasted man-hours and a new site.

[snake1264]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

hey thanks for the advice and your concern. However we literally dont plan on adding more than 4 products in the companies lifetime, since we are a very niche business. We have just a few models which we update every year or so. And as with seo, I dont want my store.mywebsite.com to even be indexed so i added a nofollow to the global header and footer in miva. So are you saying that by doing a javascript redirect this could possibly make it so that the store is visible in seo?

[snake1264]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

hmm ive done a little research and it seems that the 301 redirect you mentioned is the way to go. Can you be more specific as to how i do that?

[snake1264]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

currently this is what i have in my .htaccess:

### Begin - Inserted by Miva Merchant


DirectoryIndex /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=SFNT


### End - Inserted by Miva Merchant

[snake1264]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

can anyone tell me what exactly i have to put in the .htaccess file.

[titus]

Re: how do i redirect home page (storefront)

My recommendation is to talk to your webhost and ask them to do this. They're going to know how to do it specifically with your store. But you're going to do the redirect via a RewriteCond rather than a straight

Redirect 301 relative/path.html http://fqdn.com

The reason being, is because you're dealing with the query string (QSA flag for Apache mod_rewrite).

Doing it from the RewriteCond will catch all instances of the url, and the 301 redirect might not even work.