Is this a dumb idea ?

I have a site that is older and needs alot of updates. Outdated offers etc... and I was kind of looking to redo the whole site ... majority of info there is very uninspiring to say the least .. I was learning as I went lol ..

What I was wondering was if I could just take down the whole site and put up a video and an optin instead for the traffic coming in Until I figure out what I want to do with this site ...

It is currently a pr 4 ... I will probably lose that if I change it to an optin page ... but I just feel there really isn't much value in it right now ... it brings in no income the way it is now anyhow ...

And how would I fix it so all the pages that are ranked and have the traffic coming back don't all go to a 404 page ?

thanks so much ... :o

You could do 301 redirects to a particular page using the Redirection plugin or the htaccess file. Or just spend time updating the pages and content. Or you could sell the site.

You shouldn't lose your page rank. Page rank is based on the quality of incoming backlinks, not the content of the page. As long as you do not lose your backlinks, you should retain your PR. Now, if you start redesigning the flow of your internal links from pages pointing to your home page that also have PR of their own, you could see a drop in PR.

Not a dumb idea at all, to answer your question.
You could also put some of your content in the alt tag of images. Though page rank may not be affected by lack of content, content is still important for position on SERPS. There is no restriction as to the amount of text you can put in an alt tag of an image. You can do a similar thing on an Iframe alt tag. If the content is relevant to the image or the page , it is not spamming.

As far as a complete overhaul, I wouldn't mess with a PR4 site. You would have to have a fair amount of links coming in to your content. I would update the pages individually as you go along and not change any of the names of your pages. If you're going to change the theme of your site or the niche or you need to rename pages I would use a 301 redirect as was mentioned earlier. You can change offers and update the content of your pages without ditching the whole thing and starting over.

Steve