On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:15:05 +0100, Neil put finger to keyboard and
typed:

>Hi,
>I have a gallery installed on an ecommerce site purely as a secondary
>feature. The thing is I don't want folk to be able to bookmark the gallery
>for future visits and miss out on them visiting the ecommerce site (store).
>Also I fear search engines may drive traffic to the gallery (which is no bad
>thing) but they may not visit the store area. There are menu links to the
>gallery on the store menu and to the store on the gallery menu.
>
>What I want to achieve is:
>
>a. Visitor visits www.example.com/gallery/ from OUTWITH the domain
>(example.com), they are redirected to www.example.com/
>
>b. Visitor already browsing www.example.com/* may have unrestricted
>access to www.example.com/gallery/*

Other contributors have already said how this can be done, from the
technical perspective, as well as suggesting that it might not really
be a good idea anyway. I'd agree that it's not really a good idea, but
not just because it will tend to irritate people.

The main reason for not doing it is that you will lose the ability to
cross-sell to people who visit the gallery. Previously, you've just
had a store, and the only people who visit your site are people who
want to visit the store. You won't lose those people if you add extra
content, as people who want to visit the store will continue to visit
the store. But adding extra content, not directly related to the
store, provides a reason for other people to visit the site who may
not previously have visited it - or even known about it - because they
weren't interested (or didn't think they were interested) in what the
store is selling. So you're now getting a bunch of new visitors to the
site who wouldn't have arrived there when it was just a store. And,
since it's your site and your content, you've now got a load of pages
on which you can advertise the store. Don't just have a menu link to
the store - instead, put textual or graphical adverts for the store in
relevent places in the gallery. For example, if the store sells, say,
pet supplies, and the gallery is photos of people's pets, then have
links from the gallery pages to the relevent store pages - cat
supplies on pages with photos of cats, dog supplies on pages with
photos of dogs, etc.

Instead of wanting people to go through the store to get the the
gallery, you should use it the other way around. Use the gallery to
drive traffic to the store. Attract traffic to the gallery, and then
make sure that every visitor to the gallery sees a prominent link to
the store. Treat the gallery as free advertising, and use it
accordingly.

Mark
--
"We do what we like and we like what we do"
http://mark.goodge.co.uk - my pointless blog
http://www.good-stuff.co.uk - my less pointless stuff