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Wow, it's like Matt has no idea how web sites even work at all. This is absolutely horrible advice. Matts advice on how to do this would stretch a project like this from a few weeks to years for a small site. What the heck is he thinking?

Here Matt let me do your job for you and speak in plain specific English so everyone (ate least English speakers) can understand how to to doo this without making a mess of a thier web site as you suggest:

Use a 301 redirect for content that you had before that now has a new url and use standard good SEO (like a sitemap.xml submitted to Google and other large SE's) to introduce new content.

When you implement a CMS, you’re getting a more process-oriented approach to creating and managing content. Thus, the CMS will make it easier for people to keep site content fresh, and of equal importance, ensure content includes appropriate meta data, header tags, browser title and key words. Rolling out a CMS and redesign in a systematic way may be useful, but ultimately, even with easy to use CMSs like SiteExecutive, strong search engine rankings flow from following a consistent process.

I'm very glad that you posted that and cutts talks about it because i've been considering a major change for my site and talked about it with the webmaster a few times, though decided not to do it yet for economic reasons primarily but also out of worry about the rankings. now I have a better idea how to approach this when the time comes
thanks again Chris

I like Peanut Butter Captain Crunch cereal

I bet Matt Cutts does too

I've been asked to redesign a very large website of a client that has a good PR. I'm hoping that the redesign will not lead to them loosing their PR. This post has come and the right time for me. Thanks

Good article which re-emphasises what all SEO experts thought they knew even though it was never stated by Google.

In our experience, the toughest job was copying the content from the old HTML site into a CMS or a different Site Management Software like Joomla or Dupral which changed the url name. Meaning that it would eventually be repicked up by Google but unfortunately would lose all of its backlinks.

We recently redesigned an php site and installed seo friendly urls as part of the scope. 301 redirects weren't used as there were only a couple of new pages. However, home page traffic (same domain and url) droped by 100% for google organic traffic. We used same SEO data on new home page as old home page.

In our experience, providing your new site is an improvement over the old one (believe it or not, often this isnt the case) and you take care to place 301 redirects, you can actually gain in the organic listings.
Take the opportunity to improve inner page file extensions, and increase content quality and navigation.
Be sure to create an updated XML Site Map for googles crawlers, and also make one available to visitors in HTML.
We have had a good deal of success by adopting this strategy, and often get excellent results within a month of the new site going live.
One word of caution.
Make sure you stay 'on theme' and dont stray wildly from the websites original and main topic.
Regards
Chris Stephens
Thisworks Advertising & Marketing Services.

Well changing website design and using CMS all at once, I think Matt’s suggestion is valuable here" you should test the waters before going all out with the entire site"
Thanks Matt