Make space for a new conference website for next year, preserving permalinks

Hopefully the conference went well and we'll be interested in organising another one next year, or at some point in the future at least. It's worth thinking ahead of time about how this will work on the website domain: summit.hotosm.org (I say this as somebody who has been frustrated seeing this messed up by certain other conference websites)

Some content on the old website would ideally remain available on the web permanently, and ideally at permalinkable URLs. This applies most particularly to the details and abstracts of talks which took place at the conference. In an ideal world anybody who may have linked to this content up to this point will continue to see those links work. A lesser aim which may be more manageable, is to ensure that the new website is located such that anyone who links to that content before the conference will see the urls remain unchanged after the conference.

So on the current website we've got talks all listed on one page: http://summit.hotosm.org/program/ I think my recommendation would be to move that to http://summit.hotosm.org/2015/program/ (give the whole current website a '2015' sub-directory) preferably with a redirect set-up temporarily. Then when we come to set-up a 2016 website, that would be at http://summit.hotosm.org/2016

...but importantly we would do that before the 2016 conference. At that point we'd probably have to blow away the old redirect, break any old incoming links sadly (although google will at least have had some time to re-index), because we'll put a new redirect http://summit.hotosm.org -> http://summit.hotosm.org/2016 before the conference. This time around (and going forwards) any incoming links will be well established to be at permalinkable URLs.

hotosm / hot-summit

Make space for a new conference website for next year, preserving permalinks #49