Whoever hacked yakabout recently was pretty determined to make sure that a simple backup restore wouldn't really solve anything. A fair bit of damage has been done in the backend and although it doesn't look that bad at first glance, the more I dig, the worse it gets. This is partly my own fault for making the hackers job easier... yakabout is running on relatively old administration software, all of it out of date and most of it no longer supported. So after giving it a lot of thought I'm really left with no choice but to start fresh. New website with a new look and new approach is really the smartest answer.

In many ways I'm glad this has happened. It was just the other night that the founder of KFA popped in to say hello and while chatting away he admitted that he comes here to get ideas for his own site. Well Paffoh, at least you're willing to admit it. Quite a few other kayak fishing websites have popped up in the past year or so, a lot of them borrowing ideas from this site. In recent months it has seemed that if I happen to add a feature to the front opage, the same feature will appear on several other kayak fishing front pages within a couple of weeks. Not all of the sheep are Aussie either... take a look at yakhawaii.com (for example) and look at the similarities. Even the style of his videos are pretty much the same. 

Yakabout has always been about inspiring others... but this isn't what I had in mind. When I built this site, I didn't look for examples of what to do from other kayak fishing websites.In fact, the inspiration for the design of yakabout came from another industry theme entirely (video games actually). But the web has changed a lot in the past couple of years and the administration system I have been using doesn't support most Web 2.0 features all that well. As yakabout has evolved, so to has my direction and lately I have found myself frustrated at the limitations that yakabout has. So this is really just a good excuse to go ahead and make some major changes. 

I am very keen to get the new site online ASAP and have made the decision to focus a lot of my energy on making that happen sooner rather than later. So rather than bash my head a against a brick wall to try and rectify all of the problems created by the recent hacking venture, I'm simply going to build a new site that makes this version look lame. Something that will better facilitate content presentation, a suite of social networking features, far better search engine optimisation, much tighter security and notably faster loading times. All of these requisites rolled into a package that has a fresh look and feature set that won't be anywhere near as easy to imitate. That's what I'm aiming for with yakabout 2.

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