PaddlingLight News Update

Just a quick news update about the PaddlingLight website. Over the last year, I’ve been meaning to update the website to increase the speed and load times. I finally had a few days to do that, so before the craziness of my fall schedule kicked in I sat myself down into my office and worked on the website. This is step one of getting things updated around here.

While doing that, I also made a few changes to the look of the website. It’s basically the same-ish look but with a slightly more compact design with a simpier color scheme. Hopefully, I also increased readability. Let me know if you think so. I can change that as needed.

The online store needed a bit of an update as well, so I updated that slightly. It’s not exactly where I want it, but I think it makes a bit more sense. When people download the free canoe and kayak plans/drawings (and still not sure what to call these, because they really aren’t instructional plans), they tend to checkout multiple times, which is annoying for both the user and my inbox. Hopefully, the changes will reduce the number of multiple checkouts.

New Article and Review Index Pages!

This website has nearly 560 posts. That’s a lot of info. I don’t really have time to organize that efficiently, so I automagically did it by listing each article by category. The articles have their own index page and the reviews have their on index page. It’s much easier to see what articles are available on this website vs. scrolling through all the posts.

What’s Left to Do?

Lots. Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched the income on PaddlingLight drop by nearly 70%. Most of that is in ad or affiliate links, and if this website is going to continue on, I need to go back through old posts and update the links. While I consider this website a hobby, I do like to have the cash it generates to invest back into my paddling gear.

This winter, I plan to start writing a bunch of posts that address important and popular topics that some of the low-quality, affiliate-marketing niche sites have been writing on. The quality of the articles on these competing websites is extremely low and likely not written by paddlers. So, I’m hoping to write on similar or the same topics and write as someone who is a lifelong paddler. If my articles reach even a few paddlers and help them get good and correct information, then it will have been worth the effort.

I also need to think hard about the category system used for the website and decide if it is time to update it. As I built the website, I sort of added categories as needed without considering the entire structure. That may need to be fixed.

Feedback

I’d love to hear any feedback or thoughts on what I can do to make this a better website. Please, let me know in the comments below.