This past year, our website was beaten down, knocked out and revived only to be exploited to sell dick pills.

As traffic to our site grew, we were thrown from our web host without warning and then hacked to bits by malicious code after moving to a new host. The hack, which resulted in distorted Google search results, made it look like we were hocking Viagra and other penis enhancers to our trusted readers.

It was admittedly a sorry state of affairs and we needed to take drastic measures. Which is exactly what we did.

After weeks of planning and another month of hard work migrating and rebuilding the site, we’d like to welcome you to the new and improved thesheaf.com!

Along with a brand new design and layout, thesheaf.com is now responsive, meaning it adapts its layout to suit the device it is being viewed on. Try it by making your browser window smaller or navigating to the site on a smartphone or tablet.

We’ve migrated the site to the best WordPress-based web host money can buy. The site is now faster than ever thanks to a Content Delivery Network that serves up our content from different data centres located across North America, depending on your location.

This new host is also more reliable and secure than our previous hosts. We are confident that we’ve gotten rid of the “Pharmaspam” that has been plaguing the site for some time.

It’s only been a year or two that we’ve been trying to really step up our presence on the web. This latest redesign is a huge leap toward realizing that goal.

We’re also going to be cranking out a lot more online content this year, starting with weekly videos and photo galleries. This is where we’d like to hear from you. If you’ve got any ideas for videos, photo galleries, or any other multimedia content, send them to web@thesheaf.com.

The new and improved thesheaf.com, like most websites, is a work in progress. Some things you see now may change over time, and cool new features will be rolled out, too. If at any point you have any feedback for us — bug reports, features you’d like to see, etc. — please let us know.

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Graphic: The Sheaf