We're on the 3rd year of a yearly contest and have a bit of a problem with recycling the domain.
Year 1 We used "domain.com" as the URL for the contest. We didn't have any expection or forethought about what to do if there was a second contest.
Year 2 We reused "domain.com" and made a static page of the previous year's winners. This caused issues with permalinks and counts for fb likes etc... (One thing we want to do is highlight peoples entries to the contest in perpetuity)
Year 2.5 Realizing we had a URL problem, we created a static index page at domain.com and moved the year 2 contest to 2010.domain.com. This caused issues with permalinks and social network counts again.
Year 3 We're planning to have the contest at 2011.domain.com from the beginning to deal with the permalink issues. However, we want to use domain.com in marketing materials.
Ideas I have to do this:
- Direct people to domain.com and have them click on a big "2011.domain.com" banner.
- Move the index page to "contests.domain.com" and add a temporary redirect from domain.com to either the currently active contest or the index page in the event that the contest is over.
Is there a downside to a temporary redirect? Are there any other strategies for dealing with this issue that I missed?