It's a new year and thankfully the work inside in Dragnet Systems shows no signs of slowing down. VGWines.com is a brand new online store for an existing wine retailer based in Kerry, Vanilla Grape Wines Ltd.

The store uses Dragnet Systems own online store software. We have rebuilt the front end engine to make it easier for our in-house designers to build templates for any new stores going forward. It will also help increase the speed at which we can build new stores for clients now which is fantastic news.

It was interesting to note that due to legal issues with selling alcohol online VGWines.com can only sell to Irish consumers. This is the first time one of our stores has been faced with such a restriction but it makes sense. As always Rebecca has done a fantastic job with the design of the site and it definitely has a perfect 'wine' mood about it. I'm getting thirsty just looking at it :)

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to achive a redirect for domain.com to www.domain.com using IIS 6. Today I will show you how easy it is to set this up for IIS 7 on Win Server 2008.

You should be aware that this install requires a reboot. Only install on your server if you are in a position to restart your server.

First thing you need to do is download the rewrite module for IIS 7 from Microsoft. The 32bit version is here and the 64bit version here.

Before you can install this module you need to stop some services running on your server. Open the command prompt (Start -> Run -> type cmd and press enter) and type: net stop was /y

Now double click on the file you just downloaded and install the product. It can take a few mins and look like it's after hanging but give it a moment and it will install for you. You will be prompted to restart your server. Do this now as without a restart IIS will give you a 503 HTTP error when attempting to display a webpage.

Once the server has restarted open IIS Manager and make sure that both your domain and relevant application pool have been restarted.

Open up your browser and test your site just to double check everything is ok after the install. You should find that everything is working as normal.

You can now put the following rule in your web.config file within the <system.webServer> tag:

Save and FTP the web.config file to your server. If you type in yourdomain.com (without www.) you should notice that it redirects you to www.yourdomain.com now.

For more information about rerouting your traffic you can visit the IIS site for more details. A great place to start is on the Rule with Rewrite Map page.

If you have a SSL on your site chances are that you only want your visitors to go through your site on one particular domain. Let's say you own domain.com and you always want your visitors to go to www.domain.com when using your site. IIS 7 has a really cool rewrite module that you can use but IIS 6 users need to jump through some hoops to get this function working.

For this article I will assume that you have www.domain.com already setup on your server in IIS 6 and that you have setup your SSL to work on this domain. I will also assume that you have setup the host name for your domain to be www.domain.com, your IP address and domain.com.

Your first step is to remove domain.com from the allowed host list for this domain in IIS. To do this just right click on domain.com in IIS and select Properties. Next to the IP address of your domain click the Advanced button. Highlight the host header that has domain.com (no www.) and click remove. Click OK and apply to save and continue.

At this point you might want to rename domain.com in IIS to say domain.com (WWW) to make it clear that this setup of domain.com is for www.domain.com.

Next up add a new domain to IIS. You should name this as domain.com (no WWW) in IIS, again this is only to make it clear when you're looking through your list of domains that this setup is for domain.com without the www. subdomain. Set this up exactly the same as you did for www.domain.com but put domain.com as the host name. Once you have added domain.com to IIS go to its properties and select the Home Directory tab.

1. Select Redirect to another domain (1).
2. Remove the application name (2).
3. Enter in the domain we want to redirect to. In this case it's www.domain.com and add on $S$Q at the end of the domain so that you are specifying to IIS to redirect to the correct folder structure on www.domain.com and to pass through the correct query string values as entered by the user (3).
4. Tick the checkboxes for The exact URL entered above and Permanent Redirect (4,5).
5. Click Apply and then OK (6,7).

If you now open your browser and type in domain.com it should automatically redirect you to www.domain.com! If you test with query string values you should see that these also carry through to www.domain.com.

Although this option is not an ideal setup as it duplicates your IIS domain list it will work for you. If anyone knows a better way to achieve the same results in IIS 6 let me know.

It might be the first day of December but that hasn't stop us from launching 2 new websites to get our December releases off to a great start! Aquatech Ireland have launched 2 new online stores and a brochure site to open up their products to customers all around the world. Aquatech.ie are one of Irelands leading suppliers of renewable energy systems and alternative heating solutions. With renewable energy on everyone's lips at the moment I'm sure they will do very well for themselves. TheHeatingWarehouse.co.uk is a sister site of aquatech specifically targeting the UK market. This site isn't live just yet but should be launched in the next few days. The PolarBear.ie brochure site is a nice little springboard site to links to both of these new stores.

Over the coming weeks we have loads of new and exciting sites launching including a new online clothing store for Clintons, a new online wine store for Vanilla Grape Wines, the new redesigned City Gate Mahon and much more. My blog has suffered a bit due to two massive projects that I am currently working on. I'll have more details on this work closer to launch but I've been learning loads about Google Maps and highly scalable server setups as a result of these projects. Fun times :D

Dragnet Systems has just launched one of our newest online stores - thereallygoodsoapcompany.ie. This online store features a brand new fully featured Wholesaler section as well as all the existing functionality of our store software. This new section will let the website owners manage wholesalers, add specific wholesaler products and even control the pricing per wholesaler for shared products.

This site also contains a fully content managed news section and a fully integrated newsletter system. The site benefits from having some really nice, professionally done, product imaging. Some of these items look good enough to eat! Although I wouldn't recommend it ;)

I really like the design work our lead designer Rebecca managed to pull off on this site. It really is a gorgeous site to look at and go through. I'd like to wish all at The Really Good Soap Company the best going forward with their new store. As well as having a .ie domain site they have also registered thereallygoodsoapcompany.com to appeal to a wider market as they will ship worldwide. I'm sure they will have loads of orders over the next few weeks as the online Christmas shopping kicks off!

After many months of work I'm proud to announce my latest project HertzFlyDrive.com. This website was designed from the ground up provide Hertz with a more effective way to manage their car rental booking information and help speed up the booking process for end users.

This site has a lot of new features in it that I had great fun with including Linq to XML for the XML calls to Hertz, jQuery UI date pickers, a brand new jQuery expander made specifically for this project, contacting the database using JSON and jQuery, multiple languages, etc. The list of new tech on the site is nearly endless! I'm proud of the speed of the site compared to their older site considering all of the extras we have added to the forms. By comparison our new site loads roughly twice as fast as the older Hertz site.

It's not only raw speed that helps the end user experience but also the ease of use of the site. We rose to the challenge and set about making the site a breeze to use for users. Our new car selection page actually combines two processes in one. On the old site the end user was required to go through to two separate pages for booking a car and picking the accessories that they might want. On our site this is all done on the same page. We have also included a very nice clean way for the user to upgrade their car choice without forcing them to go back a page and forward again. Steps like these all help speed up the booking process for end users and provide a much smoother experience.

It's in the admin tools that we've really gone to town with features. There are loads of snazzy extras we've built into this system. With the old site that Hertz had there were no stats for bookings or facilities to update offers on their site. Our brand new admin tools let Hertz quickly and easily add/update/delete/order any offer for any country and/or language.

There is also a brand new email marketing tool built for this site that allows admins to send and track emails sent to customers. The emails sent can be stored and stats like number of opens, click throughs or completed bookings from an email message are all store in our system. Customers can opt out of the email marketing at any time and there is even an option for them to easily opt back in if they decide to change their mind later on.

Finally, we have provided Hertz with enough stats to keep them busy for years to come! Everything from 'how many child seats were bought?' to 'whats our most popular destination?' is available to the site admins.

We're hoping that this new web system will help drive more sales for Hertz and that end users find the site a joy to use. I'd love to hear what you think about the site so let me know in the comments below.

Dragnet Systems is pleased to announce a brand new online gardening store for Dunsland Garden Centre owned by T.V. gardening presenter (and upcoming author!) Peter Dowdall.

This site brings even more advanced features to our core online store software like Advanced Search features that allow products to be displayed by planting seasons or by colour as well as the relevant department and a really outstanding design made by our super wiz design genius Rebecca.

Right now we're putting the finishing touches to the site to make sure it looks perfect for launch. The site will be launching very soon so check back soon.

The site is now live so go on and check it out at www.gardeningonline.ie.