Over 17 years after my first website was launched on tinet (or Telecom Internet) which later became Eircom.net and which I then moved to shanemcdonald.org, I have started to port the site over to the new domain of shanemcdonald.ie which I feel is a timely move. I chose the .ie domain as I felt .com and .org did not describe the fact that I was Irish. I am implementing a New Website Design at the same time.

New Website Design for ShaneMcDonald.ie

I am currently redesigning the site and trying to firstly make it mobile friendly, as my original site for shanemcdonald.org was all coded by hand between 2001 and 2011 during a time when mobile was not an issue. As soon as mobile started to have an impact, I added some mobile-friendly code but I felt it wasn’t enough and here we are today with shanemcdonald.ie up and running and almost finished.

There is still a bit to do in redirecting the old site using .htaccess files and some PHP redirects, plus I still have to redirect the Queen site to this domain (that’s work for another day)

I hope to add more to the site in the coming weeks and hopefully, the New Website Design will be 100% finished and moved by the end of May or early June.

ShaneMcDonald.ie 2019 Update

This blog post was uploaded in May 2016 and since then I have moved the Queen Site and also updated the PHP settings. I have also removed some blog posts which were not converting. It’s best to remove content which might be damaging the SEO effectiveness of the site. In late 2018 I also added an SSL certificate to shanemcdonald.ie as I felt it was important and made the site look a bit more professional.

So far in 2019, the first 4 months has resulted in 80,000 visitors and I’m projecting to his 230,000 visitors by the end of the year (at least). That traffic volume is up 50% on 2018 which itself was up just under 50% on the previous year. Onwards and upwards, more to come on the site very soon.