Page 1

We now have the minimum amount of content and design finished to take the site live to the public.

Here's the site currently at the www.nycircuits.com address:

  Click on the image for page view.

Page 2

The site server is set up to return the page "index.html" to a request for www.nycircuits.com.

However, if there is no "index.html" file, the server will send the "index.php" file, which is the starting page for the Joomla site we just built. All we need to do is delete or rename the index.html file and our site will be live.

(The index.php file we are talking about here is not the index.php file in the template folder that we edited before. It is an index.php file in the domain root folder. Let's take a look.)

Page 3

Here's the site root folder in FileZilla. You can see:

1. index.html (the default page)
2. index.php (the Joomla start page - this will become the start page automatically if there is no "index.html" page)

  Click on the image for page view.

Page 4

Right-click index.hml and choose Rename.

  Click on the image for page view.

Page 5

We've renamed index.html to "index.old.html".

  Click on the image for page view.

Page 6

Returning to the site, we enter the address www.nycircuits.com, and now our Joomla site is displayed instead of the old site.

We can still reach the old site via www.nycircuits.com/index.old.html however.

  Click on the image for page view.

Page 7

Are we done with our launch? Not quite. We've got the minimum content up, and people who are going to www.nycircuit.com will instead go to our new site, which is what we want.

However, there are pages on the old site that are being linked to from other sites. People are still going to those old pages without being aware that there is a new site.

What we need to do is this: for each old page, we have to redirect traffic to a new page or to the new home page.

One way to do this is (on Unix/BSD/Linux) is to create a file named .htaccess in the domain root folder and put lines like this into the file:

redirect 301 /mypath/page1.htm http://www.nycircuits.com/newpage1.php

Another way to do this that is a bit more flexible is to use the Joomla OpenSEF extension component. We'll use the latter technique since we want to use "SEF" URLs anyway.

Read on to the next tutorial in this series for an explanation of installing and using the OpenSEF component.