Last June myself and Sean MacEntee launched a website called newmovies.ie and in case it’s not obvious to you, it was about movies ;)!
The site was doing alright, but nowhere near how well it should of been doing. On average, each month that website got about 150 unique visits, which is not really a lot. After a while the site ended up being put away on a shelf and forgotten about, every so often a few new movie trailers were added to it but nothing that would get a lot of traffic.
It finally came to renew the domain this year, and Irish domain names are not as cheap as a .com, they are about 4 times more expensive and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hold onto the domain or not. I ended up deciding that I would go ahead and renew the domain.
Shortly after renewing it I moved most of my websites over to a new server here in Ireland since I was getting rid of my old server. During the move I backed up all of newmovies.ie, including its database. I could easily just through it back up now, back with its old publishing software, Joomla! but I think it would be of no benefit.
Joomla! was a learning curve for me, for the first few months or so of using it I wasn’t very sure of where everything was or how to go about editing a file, even one as simple as the front page, eventually I came to terms with it and I am now confident with where most things are within Joomla!.
One of the major drawbacks of using Joomla! was that over time it became very slow, it would take a long time for pages to load, most likely due to the amount of modules/plugins that were being used.
In the end we decided that there was no point putting the site back up using Joomla! since it was slow and it could probably perform better using other publishing platforms such as WordPress, which myself and Sean know virtually inside out by now!
The idea was to basically port the old design over to WordPress and start fresh, new content, new members, new everything!
I am still all for doing this, but I am not sure when it will happen, I would ideally like to have it done before I have to renew it again next year, otherwise it would be a waste of renewing it this year.
So where I am at the moment with it is that I am trying to think of a different approach that could be taken other that directly having movie trailers, there is a way that I can make a simple page that has all the latest trailers, that would automatically update, this is just a matter of copying some code from the people who provide us with the trailers and then adding a bit of style to match the sites layout.
I am thinking of incorporating other features into the site, but just not sure and what to include. So some thought will have to be put into this domain over this summer and I think once I have completed a few of the sites that I want to get done this summer, if I have time I will come back and get a kick start with this domain!