SEO and permalinks question

[Amelia Franz]

Hi,

I'm developing a site for my church, using the Outreach theme. The diocese contracts with a local hosting provider (just him and his wife, small business) who provides hosting for all the church sites in the diocese. He is unfamiliar with, and rather unresponsive about, doing whatever he needs to do to the htaccess file to enable pretty permalinks on our site. We are under a bit of pressure to go ahead and launch the site in the next couple of weeks.

If we go ahead and launch with the ugly default permalinks, will it be simple to go back and change to pretty permalinks in the future (when the hosting provider decides to enable it)? Or should we wait to launch the site, until we can get the pretty permalinks in place?

Thanks,
Amelia

[NicktheGeek]

the "ugly" permalinks will always work, so if you enable "pretty" permalinks later you will not have a problem.

[Amelia Franz]

Thanks, Nick. But will the new pretty permalinks be able to just replace the old, ugly default ones? I'm a little confused, sorry.

[NicktheGeek]

The pretty permalinks will automatically start working and if someone tries to follow the old "ugly" permalink it will be rewritten as a pretty permalink. For example. Visit this link and you will see that it is automatically changed to the "pretty" permalink
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?p=1124

[Amelia Franz]

Thank you, Nick!

[NicktheGeek]

You're welcome.

Since this is resolved I'm going to close this thread.