Blog Advice

[wes]

So I finally decided to start a blog for my e-commerce site, but now I
have a dilemma. My site was built in ASP. I downloaded the
wordpress.org version and it works fine at www.mysite.com/blog;
however, when I use custom URLs for the posts - it doesn't work. This
makes sense to me now because it is on a Windows server, but didn't
realize I'd have this problem. Of course, the main reason I started a
blog is for SEO purposes and now I can't have SEO friendly URLs. So
what should I do? Should I just host my blog on a separate domain and
do a redirect from www.mysite.com/blog to the blog? If I do that,
will I still get credit on my e-commerce site for the content? If
not, I guess I could re-do my site in php, but I'd rather not go there
if I don't have to. Other ideas are welcome. I am pretty set on
wanting to use wordpress.org.

[glaikit]

Hi Wes,

This is a VERY good question - hey folks, can anybody else help?

How "custom" are the blog URLs you wanted to set up?
Since it's fairly new, can you tinker with resetting Wordpress to
using the default version of the post URLS and see if it works OK?

I'm not going to be much tech support on this... I believe that all
this has to do with the .htaccess file that Wordpress creates at the
root of your site, and I'm not sure how happy Windows servers are with
the .htaccess file.

I am not positive but I suspect doing a redirect of some sort is
somehow going to either cause problems, or be a disappointing
compromise.

At this point I'm just hoping none of my clients come to me with an
ASP site that wants a blog added :-(

Fiona

On Sep 25, 12:33 pm, wes <wesgra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I finally decided to start a blog for my e-commerce site, but now I
> have a dilemma.  My site was built in ASP.  I downloaded the
> wordpress.org version and it works fine atwww.mysite.com/blog;
> however, when I use custom URLs for the posts - it doesn't work.  This
> makes sense to me now because it is on a Windows server, but didn't
> realize I'd have this problem.  Of course, the main reason I started a
> blog is for SEO purposes and now I can't have SEO friendly URLs.  So
> what should I do?  Should I just host my blog on a separate domain and

> do a redirect fromwww.mysite.com/blogto the blog?  If I do that,

[Corey Creed]

Hi Wes,

I've always encouraged using Fantastico to install your WordPress
blog. This seems to eliminate issues like this. Who are you hosting
with? Do they have any ideas? Also, how is your e-commerce site
made? What are you using?

The decision on if your site should have a blog on the same domain or
on a different one is sometimes decided by how strange it will look.
If you have one design for your e-commerce site, it is typically not
easy to make WordPress look just like it.

Corey

[wes]

Fiona,

The default URLs for Wordpress posts are like this: http://mysite.com/blog/?p=10.
You can customize them to use the title of the post like this:
http://mysite.com/blog/title-of-my-post

So the latter is much better for SEO, as you know. Windows servers
don't use htaccess files unfortunately. I think there is some sort of
redirect I can do on a Windows server, but not sure if Google will
give me the content credit. Bummer!

> > do a redirect fromwww.mysite.com/blogtothe blog?  If I do that,

[wes]

Corey,

I'm not familiar with Fantastico, but I skimmed their site and I'm not
sure it will help because of the whole Windows server thing. I host
with a company called Hostek. Their idea was to create another domain
- they never really answered the question about content. I use
ecommercetemplates.com. I'm not worried about getting the blog to
look like my site, just want to make sure I get credit for the content
on my main site. I think I might be out of luck. Should've done php
in the first place. Oh, well.