If you are updating an old site that has pages indexed in the search engines you don’t want to just move the content to a new page. If you do, visitors will get a 404 page not found message. You will also loose any links that may have been pointing to that page. Neither of these is desirable.
As we make the switch to WordPress with the Thesis them this is going to be an ongoing issue. Since we are hosted on Linux servers the answer is .htaccess. This is a file you place in the root folder on your server that tells incoming page requests where to go. It also tells the search engines this is a permanent change so they should update their information.
There are lots of things which can be done with htaccess commands but it is one of those old, cryptic syntaxes which can be really painful to deal with if you are not an expert. What seem like very tiny changes can make your whole website vanish.
I did a search and found a tutorial that provided the redirect code which I could add to my existing htaccess file. This would have been much more difficult if my programmer had not already created an htaccess file to handle some other issues. Since there was an existing file I could add some simple lines of code to make the changes.