For the past year or so the forum over at IrishWebmasterForum.com has been offline. There’s a multitude of reasons why it ended being taken offline, but basically I didn’t have enough time or energy to move it to a better platform and actively maintain it. I probably still don’t have a lot of free time for these little “side projects”, but it’s one of those sites that people would ask me about from time to time and they seemed to genuinely miss it.
So last week, while I was playing around with some of the cloud hosting stuff we offer, I thought I’d finally get around to spinning up a virtual machine running the latest version of cPanel and move a live site over to it. I chose IWF.
Years and years ago Peter from Edenweb did a really nice job on the site’s original logo:
(Sorry if it’s a bit small, but I seem to have misplaced the original graphic and only have the version(s) that were in use on the site.)
In many ways that logo was perfect at the time and it served the site well.
Several years later and now with a new platform for the site (XenForo) Stephen offered to give the logo a “refresh”, which you can see above.
What do you think? Personally I really like it. It keeps the same colour scheme as before, yet it’s super simple.
So what about the site itself?
For now it’s back online and is getting new members. Whether they’ll hang around and actively use the site is anyone’s guess.
Switching to a new platform has brought a lot of nice benefits and also gives me a chance to purge a lot of the crud that a vBulletin install that had been upgraded multiple times over the years invariably picked up. The new site is “responsive”, so it is quite usable on mobile, which these days is a very important factor in any site’s design (or at least should be). There’s quite a few features for members as well, such as the ability to link various social services to their account quickly and easily.
Hopefully people will start using the forum again!
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