Now, I know how much affection many of you have for the old site, which was launched in 2008. That’s right, not long after the debut of the first iPhone. The world was young.
Running the old site has been a dream. A dream in which I am speeding down a hill in a rusted out cargo van with three flat tires, while an exhausted and terrified webmaster sits in back issuing updates from an old telex machine. Our webmaster once said that CLC’s site was like a wet cardboard box, and every page on the site was a Yellow Post-It Note. Something like that.
Of course the old site was getting a bit frowsy. It was frowsy ten years ago. Hey, I was getting frowsy ten years ago. We have a complicated product and it took a long time to find a reputable web design outfit that grokked CLC. At length we settled on a firm that set out to build the new site using Wordpress. Four years, $220,000, and two CLC staff nervous breakdowns later, we had not a single usable page. (We recovered from the nervous fits, but did not recover the $220,000. Litigation pending.)
We had better luck with the next outfit, this time on a Shopify platform. You’ll see it soon.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. This forum will trundle on unchanged. (The PocketShip Forum, an older platform, is having a spell right now. It will be back ASAP.)
2. Your customer profile and order history WILL migrate to the new site.
3. You will log into the NEW site using the email address associated with your CLC account. 4. The new site will send a code to your email address. That’s how you’ll connect to your old customer profile.
5. This is also how you will log on in the future—no passwords. Safety is the name of the game in two-thousand-ought-twenty-five. You’ll always log in with a code sent to your email address.
Thanks for your patience with the old site, and bear with us as the new site launches. For a while, there will be occasional broken links and missing images. Here and there you may find “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” instead of the intended text. If you encounter any serious functional issues, hit us up: info@clcboats.com.
See you on the other side! A few screen shots:
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Hmmm. All good except that emailed login code. In the good old days, we only needed the website to be functional. Now we need the website and our email to be functional. I hope that those codes are not the kind that expire quickly. Depending on how the interweb is feeling, it can take up to 1/2 an hour for an emailed code to arrive in my inbox. Is there an option to stay logged in more or less permanently, as with this forum?
In the meantime, the sample pages are certainly visually appealing. You’ve all done such an excellent job hiding the current site’s flaws that I don’t think anyone outside CLC will properly appreciate the reliability upgrade, but the looks will be stunning.
I will miss the novelty of having made the first purchase off the current website, though (total serendipity, no planning on my part). I also sometimes miss the old website, the one before this one. I’m not sure why. I just do 
I’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing the new new one and good luck with the litigation,
Laszlo
I think once you log in with the code the first time, you’ll stay logged in unless the servers sniff something risky about your connection. 2025-era site security is pretty amazing.
However, you might NOT have to log in again to access this bulletin board once the new site goes live. The bulletin boards reside on their own separate, secure platforms.
And thanks for the note on the Pocketship Forum- I was wondering what was happening. Looking forward to the new site and return of the forum!
Laszlo, I think you know better! Some form of 2 factor authentication really is necessary these days - especially if a site stores any information of any signification value. I understand it is a nuisance but …..
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Of course it is. I was using it at work 15 years ago. My concern is with the implementation. Far too many implementations these days cut corners and don’t consider all the consequences of the schemes they choose. Doubling the number of required components doubles the chances of failure. The type of components determine the likelihood of that failure. Redundancy in the implementation mitigates all this (for example, allowing the 2nd factor to be delivered via email, text and voice, user’s choice).
I was just trying to get a sense of where the new scheme stood, not saying that it wasn’t necessary.
Laszlo
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