Speedonthewater.com 3.0 Goes Big

Completely redesigned and restructured, the new speedonthewater.com website actually went live eight days ago. But there were some bugs to work out—there always are with massive website revisions—and we wanted them as gone as humanly possible before we officially announced the launch of what is the third iteration of the daily high-performance powerboating news site in the past 10-plus years.

And here we are now, doing just that.

Welcome to the new speedonthewater.com.. Enjoy the ride.

Something you’ll surely notice after you finish ogling the extra-large photos in the slideshow at the top of the home page? We’ve added a Classified advertising sales section for individual powerboat owners and dealerships, as well as boat builders that carry pre-owned inventory. It’s a robust Classified section, which combined with the traffic speedonthewater.com drives through consistent daily news reporting, should prove to be a powerful sales tool.

You’ll also notice that the Speed On The Water digital magazine, which publishes six times a year, is now a paid download. That was something we intended to handle years ago but simply never got around to doing. But don’t fret. An annual subscription will set you back at whopping $18 for what is the best digital or print title covering high-performance powerboating world.  

As for the new look of the site itself, we had two mandates for Dekker Web Solutions, the Michigan-based company that tackled the formidable task of transforming a 7,000-plus-article, 16,000-plus-image website from a Joomla content platform to a WordPress content platform.

Bigger images. Cleaner home page.

We think Chris Dekker, one of the founders of West Michigan Offshore and avid performance-boat owner, and his team nailed both of those objectives. Every time we look at the site, we smile.

The project took more than a year, which was quite a bit longer than anyone involved expected. There were plenty of speed-bumps and frustrations and long, long hours for the DWS and SOTW teams. Dekker Web Solutions literally had developers in far-flung corners of the world working on the site. From our end, we had to continually review it as it took shape while tending to the pesky task of reporting daily news and everything else we do with speedonthewater.com.

The new speedonthewater.com website has been streamlined.

You surely will find a bug or two—a missing image, a broken link and so on—as you explore Speedonthewater.com 3.0. We’re counting on it. But since the site launched a week ago Monday, the DWS crew has been working hard to clean up glitches. They should be done by the end of the week.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new site. And in the coming months, you can look forward to a few new additions. We didn’t coordinate this launch to coincide with the tail-end of a pandemic, but we’re not unhappy it worked out that way. Like us, you probably could use a lift. We hope exploring the new site gives you one, and we look forward to hearing from you.