How would you do redesign in this case?

Hello fellow BHW members,

Recently I got pretty big order from one of my clients. They want me to make a redesign of their website. The problem is the site currently looks like that:

www.somedomain.com -> This is their current site, it is pretty ugly and html based
www.new.somedomain.com -> This is their old design (in spite of being called new.). This is joomla based

The website is owned by a travel magazine. They asked me to create a new site for them on somedomain.com, I want to use wordpress for this and they want me to merge the content from both old sites (somedomain.com and new.somedomain.com, most of the content are posts-like stories from various places in the world) in new design. Is there any way to merge both sites into new design (WP Elegant Themes Lucid theme) other than simply coping it and deleting the old sites and thus loosing it from the search engine?

Redirect new.somedomain.com to www.somedomain.com and copy all the content of the subdomain to the root domain. You can also redirect the urls of the posts on the subdomain to their corresponding urls on the root domain after copying the content over instead of doing a sitewide redirect to the root domain.

The advantage of this over sitewide redirects is that posts on the subdomain that have good rankings in Google will maintain their positions after the transition and redesign.

Thanks SEO Power. So when I install and configure wordpress I should just made posts with same titles and copy the content from the old page? And then on the old page set redirections to new posts? Do I get it right?

And what would you suggest to do with the current page (html one) which is pretty ugly and is currently under www.somedomain.com? Because at the moment they have 2 websites (on one content is older on one it is newer) and they want to get them together on www.somedomain.com.