From both the loyal visitor and publisher perspectives website redesign kind of sucks. As a visitor, going to your favorite website and finding nothing where it once was is aggravating.

Add the terror of losing years of content, the cost involved and the time it takes to do the job properly—both of which always exceeds estimates—and you begin to understand the publisher viewpoint. It’s not a comfy process.

Website redesign is a monstrous but necessary recurring process. Photo by Jeff Helmkamp copyright Helmkamp Photos.

Yet it is a necessary evil, particularly when website’s template-theme no longer receives security updates. That leaves you vulnerable to hackers. And hackers suck worse than website redesign.

So you close your eyes, say a prayer or sacrifice a live chicken—whatever works for you—and go for it.

The entire procedure—think of it as cosmetic surgery don’t want but know you need—will be done midweek. Between now and then, I’ve been gently instructed to “stay hell away” from backend of speedonthewater.com, meaning the site’s WordPress content management system.

Translation? For the next few days, I probably won’t be able to publish anything new on speedonthewater.com. I don’t know how you’ll survive.

Joking aside, I will be publishing all week on Powerboat Nation, a website we’ve partnered with to expand our digital footprint. And of course I will bring those stories to you through our social media portals.

Speedonthewater.com 3.0 will be live soon enough. And in a week or so, we’ll probably all settle in—no one likes change all that much—and stop hating it.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience and support.