In 1999 I bought my first kayak. Years before I had kayaked a bit, but I never thought of buying my own kayak. It was a budget model because I didn't know if I would like to go kayaking a lot. But I enjoyed it, and soon I wanted another model that's more suitable for longer trips and bigger water. In that year I also started to experiment making a website. I didn't have a digital camera yet, so I had to scan in my photo's on paper. In 2000 I went to the kayak shop of Arend Bloem in Wormer to see what's on the market and what would suit me. I bought an Eagel Seajett, a model more suitable for lakes and canals, but still not too costly. Then I also bought my first digital camera because they became affordable (although memory cards were still small and expensive). I found out that there was very little information about where to kayak. Practically none on the internet and very little at the local tourist information desks (VVV). So I started exploring, made many photo's and bought the domain name kanoroutes.nl. Gradually the number of routes increased and so did the number of visitors. In 2000 I had only about a 100 visitors a year, in 2012 I had 65.604 visitors with 131.675 page vieuws. In 2013 for the first time the number dropped a bit. Maybe because of the economical crisis, but also maby because the website with frames became a bit outdated.
The Eagle Seajett I owned from 2000 tot 2006.
So in 2014 I said farewell to the WYSIWIG editor Frontpage and made a new website from scratch. I use Expression Web 4, that's free available from Microsoft now. I had to learn a bit about HTML, CSS and DWT, but it's going fine. The code is a lot more structured and search-engine friendly. So I hope this will increase the number of visitors again. The content is the same, and also the old website is recognizabele as there is the same back-ground with the clearday-clouds from Frontpage. Also the lay-out is very much the same: a content-register on the left (not in a frame) with the routes in the same order roughly from north to south.
