We have our old site into core PHP and we have developed it again into Joomla 1.5 last year( because of some limitations we have to build it into 1.5). Now the problem is the URL of sites changed as we have use SEO URLS on joomla.

In between we have use .htaccess to redirect user from old URL to new like this

Redirect /pages/oldpage.php http://www.mydomain.com/products/category/new_page.html

Is this good practice to redirect user to new URL or not?(we have used same server).

One more thing, We have used splash page on our site, and to set up it we have made some changes and because of it one of the important link is not working, and it is

http://www.mydomail.com/index.php

How can I get rid of it? I have used DirectoryIndex splash.html home.html index.php in .htaccess to open splash page first when someone open my site http://www.mydomain.com.

Note: my website hosted on dedicated ubuntu server.