I thought I would share some of the trials and tribulations of switching to the blogging format.  I just migrated over my old website on Earthlink into a wordpress blog hosted by Hostgator.  I ran into some difficulty making my redirects work so that anyone coming to one of my old pages would see my new pages instead.  I specifically didn't not want to lose any pagerank or pages indexed with Google.

I tried to put the redirect commands in my .htaccess file but for some unknown reason that didn't work and actually blocked my whole site from loading.  I then tried to use the redirects from cpanel and that didn't work either.  I really didn't have time to troubleshoot these methods anymore so I went to the  Semiologic Pro forum for a solution.

I found it in the Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe.  You have to make a couple of small changes to the plugin to make it work with Semiologic Pro - those changes are found at http://forum.semiologic.com/discussion/3394/resolved-301-redirect-redirection-plugin/#Item_0.