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An exceptionally written article about grid based design for the web from the guys at Designin Former.

The minute I seen this “mini site”, I feel in love with it. Everything just gels together and oozes elegance. The minimal set-up uses a gorgeous sleek (and large!) font as the main heading and gently introduces the reader to the guts of the article with a nice excerpt.

The clear separation of content and visual hierarchy really do it for me on this one and I love that it’s in no way cluttered but still offers stunning aesthetics.

He has a range of sites in a number of different sectors ranging from free stuff to gifts.
PersonalisedGifts.co.uk is his first “big” domain purchase and felt it needed a design that matched up to it being the premium domain in this sector and to be a place to bring all the different personalised gifts out there together in one place.

We hope it does extremely well Mark and thank you for choosing Eire Studio!

Web Designer excellence: http://www.iia.ie/net-visionary/vote/13

Web Together, previously trading as ‘David Behan Web Design’ is one of Ireland’s best web design companies in my opinion. I admire their work alot and am happy that we have companies like this to put ‘Ireland on the map’ in the design industry. Good luck David.

Best use of Social media: http://www.iia.ie/net-visionary/vote/19

Blacknight Hosting is probably the best hosting company in Ireland and one that I use to host this very site. The MD, Michele Neylon is always on twitter/facebook etc giving out crazy promotions and discounts, not that he needs to I’d say, so these guys are getting my vote for Best use of Social media. Good luck Michele.

Internet Entrepreneur: http://www.iia.ie/net-visionary/vote/7

Ronan O’ Brien is an Irish Serial Entrepreneur with some very successful businesses including The Costume Shop, Ireland’s biggest B2C e-commerce website and he is about to launch one or two more in the coming months! He is a professional, dynamic and very motivated entrepenuer. Good luck Ronan.

Voting closes: 30 April, so hurry up!

The migration from the old site to the new, went remarkably smooth and the site was only down for about 5 minutes which I class as a big success (Also, I’m sure my method is not the most elegant). Because of the fact that WordPress and WMPU share 99% of the same codebase, the conversion was painless.

I am going to briefly explain how I did it.

Step 1 – Backup

Backup, Backup, Backup!

Using ftp, everything was backed up, as in the complete installation and all sub directories of the existing wordpress installation. Then I dumped the entire mysql database for the site. Now if we bodge it up, it doesn’t really matter, we have the most important thing, our data.

Step 2 – Download

Download WPMU and overwrite all existing wordpress files and folders. Now delete the .htaccess and wp-config.php files. Pop over into the browser and refresh your site. You should now see an install screen. (Note: my site is for personal use and gets only a few visitors, so If your site is big and gets alot of traffic, put up a blank index.php file to protect yourself against malicious users.) Fill in your database details as per your original wordrpess installation and log in. You should now have a working install of WMPU.

Step 3 – Migrate

So, we now have a spanky new WPMU install, pretty cool huh? Our next step is to migrate all of our old content into WMPU. While having a peek through PHPmyadmin, I see some new tables created by WMPU: wp_1_ etc. Keep a note of the these.

Now I select the main tables which are below and export only these tables. Also, select the ‘Add DROP TABLE’ checkbox.

• wp_comments
• wp_commentmeta
• wp_links
• wp_postmeta
• wp_posts
• wp_terms
• wp_term_relationships
• wp_term_taxonomy

With the sql file, I open this in a text editor and begin to replace the old table names with the new ones.

For example. When fixing the wp_posts table for use with WPMU, I simply do a find and replace like so:

Find wp_posts Replace wp_1_posts and do this for all of the 8 tables above.

Step 4 – Patch

WordPress MU adds a ‘/blog’ to your posts and removes the www from the url by default. If you have some content indexed in Google and don’t want to lose any traffic, there are 2 optional steps left.

Download and activate this plugin.

And add this to your .htaccess file to convert www traffic to the new non www url.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now, you are done and have a WordPress Mu installation, congrats!

Conclusion

As mentioned at the start of this post, this is most likely not the most elegant solution but It worked absolutely fine for me and should work for you too. Also, in regards to the media files, you can replace these permalinks in mysql and point them to the new files/ folder, but as this is a small site, I’m fine with my images pointing to my old wp_content folder.

Freetastic.co.uk is a brand new player to the freebies niche and is definitely one to watch out for!

Logorama is a fun quirky independent short created by H5.

This is a masterpiece of work and must have taken years to create. The storyline is a bit bizarre but so funny to watch.

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I am so excited to launch Free Stuff‘s brand new sparkly design to the world!

Free Stuff is an established player in the freebies niche and has been online a heck of a number of years. The owner, Nick Smith contacted Eire Studio about the possibility of us redesigning the tired design and to add a content management system to easily create freebie articles.The old site was updated by hand with html!

Eire Studio’s responsibility was to bring the site up to date by creating an attractive design and make the site more usable for the readers.

Nick, thank you so much for the opportunity to work on the site. It really was a pleasure and hell of a lot of fun!

In case you’re wondering, here is the previous design:

• .info – €4.95 1 year registration.
• .com – Registrations and transfers reduced to €4.99 / year – discount in cart
• .mobi – €6.75 / year (transfers too!) If you add the WordPress Mobile pack you’ll have a mobile ready website in no time!
• .eu – €2.95 / year (registrations)
• .im – €4.95 / year
• .me – €11 / year
• be – €2.99 – transfers too!
• co.uk – €3 / year – discount in cart
• .ie – registrations AND transfers reduced to €16.95 / year. Discount in cart. Offer valid on ALL registration periods. No limit per customer. Offer ends December 31st 2009