About ShaneMcDonald.ie
The website ShaneMcDonald.com website started in 1999 as an alumni-style website for the Commercial Software Development 1995-1999 course which I took at Waterford Institute of Technology (now SETU) which graduated in 1999. That alumni website expanded quickly and for some years much of the content was no longer required; As a result a revamp of the site was done between 2003 and 2006. During this time other content such as photography and music content was added.
If you browse this site now you will see I’m big into music and I’m a keyboardist with a Clonmel based Classic Rock band called Custom160 and musical director/keyboardist with Queen Tribute Band Celebrating Queen‘ you can view my music timeline on the site also.
At its peak, this site got up to 30,000 visitors per day. However, a security breach (due to a dodgy hosting company which I then quickly left) in 2009 resulted in the site being taken down for 6 months resulting in a huge drop in traffic to the site. I moved much of the content to shanemcdonald.org and I hosted it on Blacknight Web Hosting which is based in Carlow (fantastic hosting). During this time the traffic on the site built up once again. In mid-2016 I did one final move. ShaneMcDonald.ie is the new home of my site and I chose the dot ie domain as I’m based in Ireland and it’s a great TLD to show off your country of origin!
The new Shane McDonald.ie site is no longer getting that level of traffic but with the move and redesign it is growing again. At the time of writing this page, I’m getting about 450 visits per day and about 19,000 to 22,000 page views per month. It turns out that by moving the website using 301 redirects (a tech term for forwarding the location of website addresses), the link juice or Search Engine quality is not passed on. So my search engine optimization on the site must now start again. It was something I had done from day one but hey, its a new challenge. I’m adding at least one blog post a week, and new features as much as I can. Don’t forget to check out my Queen site and my Photography website.
Some of the photos which used to reside on the pictures and photo gallery of shanemcdonald.org have been moved onto shanemcdonald.ie now… purely for posterity, as the photos are not exactly my best work. At this time I am also transferring my travel articles from ShanesTravelReviews.com and these will reside in the Travel section of this site.
Hopefully, you will find some content of interest on the website. Don’t forget to follow @mrshanemcdonald on Twitter !
I hope you Enjoy your visit to shanemcdonald.ie and hope you come back soon…
Shane
