This has been a long, long road! But it’s finally here. Welcome to the new CoffeeGeek.com! Can you believe it?
We’re going to be celebrating all month and we roll out the new website, introduce you to the new Blog team, and start rolling out all the new content. We are also launching a pretty major giveaway contest to celebrate the relaunch, and this will be announced on Friday, April 9. All this news is to come.
If you don’t mind me giving a bit of background, this website is now nearly 20 years old; it was initially built in late September, 2001, and launched on December 12, 2001.
It was, in a sense, a make work project for my web design company way back then because of 9/11. You see, we had four big design contracts for that fall, all American clients, and one by one after 9/11, they postponed or cancelled the contracts. I didn’t want to lay off our staff, so I put my small team together on building a new website that was to become CoffeeGeek.com. I don’t want to bore you with the details past that, but if you’re interested, I wrote about it in detail on the old website a while back.
We overhauled the website in 2002, and again in 2003 when we launched our forums. In 2005, the entire site got another makeover, and in 2007 yet another tweak of the design and a huge change to the content management system (CMS) that we designed to run the website..
The CoffeeGeek Website in 2007, last year the site got a full top to bottom redesign.
And… that was it. From 2007 through 2020, the CoffeeGeek website was more or less the same design, same back end CMS, same look and feel. The website was designed to run on 1024×768 displays, and never diverted from that. As mobile browsing took off, our website looked horrible on mobile platforms. We even ran the website on an ancient version of PHP (4.xx) because we couldn’t update it (this is the main reason why that version of CoffeeGeek.com wasn’t secure, on https).
Attempts at Redesign
Three times I tried to do a complete website overhaul. First time was in 2009, and we got through the design phase but stumbled on the programming side of things. Second time was in 2013, and again, we even got as far as having the design signed off, and html pages coded, but the stumbling block was our forums and migrating them to a new CMS system. Again in 2016, I thought we could make it happen, and things in my personal life interfered (it was good stuff – we moved from Vancouver to Victoria).
This past year, an absolute disaster struck our website community. I don’t want to rehash it in this new blog post, but if you want the gory details, I did cover it in a lengthy post back in October of 2020.
This was the final straw, and lead to some very difficult decisions. Our forums and forums community has long been the albatross to doing a complete overhaul of CoffeeGeek. To a slightly lesser extent, our consumer-written reviews — all 7,500 of them — were also a major roadblock.
We had some tough decisions to make. And so we did.
What We Had to Give Up
The biggest sorrow for me is that I had to retire our forums. There is so much history and evolution steeped in the CoffeeGeek forums, it nearly broke my heart to have to leave them behind. But there is some good news. They still exist, but exist on a private hard drive (with backups) that some day may be revived.
We also had to put aside our Consumer Reviews section for the time being. But the good news here is that we do have plans in the work to bring them back to this website and provide much more modern ways for you to write reviews about your coffee and espresso equipment.
That’s the sad news of this migration to the New CoffeeGeek. I’d rather focus on the good stuff. And there’s a lot of it.
The New CoffeeGeek Website
You’re browsing around the result of six months of work, and you’re reading content in a brand new section of the CoffeeGeek website – the CoffeeGeek Blog!
The Blog is what we think of as our daily newspaper on this website. You’ll be able to visit and read daily updates about anything and everything involving specialty coffee and the consumers who love it. From micro product reviews, to coffee reviews, from cafe culture interest pieces, to industry news pertinent to the consumer who loves specialty coffee. We’ve styled the blog to be a quick and easy read, easily identifiable by it’s Hunter Green signature colour and unique layout compared to other parts of this website. The green colour will also help you identify blog posts linked to from other parts of the website, like our front page or on the search results page.
We’ve also set the CoffeeGeek Blog up with major sections, including major topics like coffee history, new products, coffee reviews, and many more. This will help you drill down to the specific content you want to find, without having to rely on the search function too much.
You can expect to find a wide range of blog posts going forward, on topics like ethics in coffee, cafe culture from around the world, trends in coffee, technology in coffee, even mini interviews with some of the best experts in the field of specialty coffee and the equipment used to make it.
I’m also very excited to announce that we have six Blog writers for launch, and hope to add another three or four to the mix. The goal is to get at least 30 posts made a month, to keep you, our community, informed, entertained and educated on specialty coffee.
And if you would like to be part of this team and write for the CoffeeGeek Blog, we have a form sign up on the right sidebar; I’d love to hear from you!
Wrapping Up
Because this is a blog post, and because our blog posts must be under 1,000 words, I’ll be sharing much more information with you the next time around regarding this new website, it’s functionality and new sections, and the plans for Phase Two and Phase Three of the CoffeeGeek website re-launch.
But for now, enjoy! Take a spin around the website and check it out!
Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.
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Mark Princehttps://coffeegeek.com/author/markprince/
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Mark Princehttps://coffeegeek.com/author/markprince/
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Mark Princehttps://coffeegeek.com/author/markprince/
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Mark Princehttps://coffeegeek.com/author/markprince/
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