Working late on the Wisconsin Canoe Company website

We’ve got a new website!

Working late on the Wisconsin Canoe Company website
Typical working conditions, except this was a technical issue that I had to deal with at 2am in a Flint, MI hotel. Ugh.

Over the course of the past few months I’ve been going back and forth over whether or not we needed to put together a new website.  The old one had been working pretty well for the past 6 years and while I couldn’t always get it to do exactly what I wanted, it was functional.  I’ve had many debates over many beers about website form vs function with my friend Nick Wilkes of Devil’s Lake Climbing Guides fame.  While I can barely build websites for my own projects, Nick occasionally gets paid to do this kind of stuff which ultimately drove me to his point of view.  Thus, thebestcanoecompanycompanyever.com 2.0 was born.

I’m amazed at how fast technology advances on all fronts.  I mean, it’s easy to see in the grand scheme of things – self driving cars, drones, video games, streaming tv, smart phones, etc – but in the case of rebuilding this website, I’ve come back to a field I largely ignored since 2010.  What took me three or four weeks for a mediocre outcome back then doesn’t even compare to now.  This site, built from the ground up with freely available tools on the internet, fully responsive to all screen sizes, and pretty decent looking (if I’m allowed to say so) was done single handed in under a week for a grand total of $3.50 (paid for icons).  Crazy.  Huge shout out to all of those developers and programmers that poor countless hours into open source software.

Given this is all brand new and put together by a complete amateur, please forgive the occasional screw ups.  Better yet, please point them out by emailing us! I promise it’ll be appreciated.  Thanks guys! Hope to see you out on the river this summer!

Ryan