TOPIC: Converting from former website to new one

Hey,
We currently have a website hosted by HomeGauge.  All of our business cards have this website address on it.  All of our emails had this website on them.  Our clients view their reports via this website.  Our clients and realtors use this website for scheduling online appointments too.  All our email correspondence uses this website URL.

We are designing a new website here using a new URL that's SEO friendly. 

What is your advise for handling this?  How do we transition from the old to the new?  Currently we still are using HomeGauge reporting system.  But John spends as much time on the reports as he does on the inspections, sometimes more.
We are using the schedule center in house for scheduling appointments because it's helps run the company not just a appointment scheduler. 

I know you can forward one URL to another.  Is that true for email too?  What are our options?
Thanks for your time and info,
Robin
Starmark Home Inspections

Hi Robin,

You have a few options. First we have many HomeGauge users who use our website hosting and add the report login to our sites. If you go this route then you would just forward the old domain name to the new one. People looking at a business card wouldn't even notice the difference. You could also maintain 2 separate sites. Many guys have up to 5 sites on here, targeting different cities or even the same cities but trying to get on page one of Google mutiple times. Is the old site ranked at all for any terms? How long did you have the domain name?

You can obviously switch over to Home Inspector Pro software as well and use our upload service but that's up to you. Try out the latest version, it has 4 residential templates, 2 commercial, a mold template and another dozen templates here on the message board guys have uploaded.

You could forward email as well. You'd basically leave an email account up with the old domain name and have the email forwarded to the new account.

Thanks! We've had the site for about 2 years.  The site is a sponsered site on google and yahoo. Another company keeps it on the first page where the list of companies is located on a map.  But it's not on the first page organically.
How does having two sites keep you high on the organic list?

I'm spending so much of my time working with the fonts.  I probably complicate things by the method I'm using to enter the data onto the site.  Do you have any tips?

If you get two sites on the first page of Google you have a better chance of getting the booking as the average client calls 3 inspectors.

If you're paying someone to list it on the map at the top of the site, you're getting robbed. That's a free service from Google.

Don't paste content from other sites or Word as it will mess up your fonts. If you are copying from another site, copy to notepad first (start->program->accessories) and then copy from there into the program. Mess with fonts last, get your content going first.

Thanks.  In our emails notifying clients that their reports have been uploaded, we refer them to our website to login with a userid and password.  The link is www.starmarkinspections.com/getyourreport.html   If we forward starmarkinspections.com to our new website here, I guess the forward to take them to charlottehomeinspector.com/getyourreport.html?  For our future clients and emails we can change the link to point to our new website but if our current clients go back to their emails and click on link to get to their report, they need to be able to get to it.  Is this a problem?
Thanks,
Robin
Also we're interested in setting up another website.  How should it be organized compared with the one we are setting up now?  What URL should we use?  We are currently using www.charlottehomeinspector.com .
If we use the naming convention and all the tips you mention in you SEO tutorial, will we need to participate in payperclick and adword campaigns?  I guess I need to cancel my subscription to keep us on the google business map.  What about the sponsor service?
Thanks for all your help and advise,
Robin