CoffeeGeek launched on December 12, 2001. It was actually born because of 9/11 (and you can read about it here more in detail). At the time, I had a web development company and had four major web design contracts lined up for the fall of that year. But when 9/11 happened, all of our clients — American companies — pulled the job orders and asked us to cancel or put them on hold. I had an idea for CoffeeGeek in my mind for about 2 years at that point, so instead of laying off our staff, CoffeeGeek became a “make work” project for our company. We started building it in mid September, and rolled out the public version on December 12th that year.
This website has always been driven by 100%, custom content management system software my company wrote, called WIPS, for Web Integrated Publishing System. It was a fantastic CMS, and we licensed it to several companies each year back in the early 2000s. We updated it in three major versions, the last of which was 2007. I was (and am) proud of WIPS, because it had features and functionality that predated anything found in WordPress, or Drupal or other modern day content management systems. In fact, it still has some features that these major CMS systems don’t have to this day.
Which is where things became difficult for CoffeeGeek. Our last major design and technical overhaul for the website was in 2007 (though several modern design changes occurred in the following years). My web development company had shut by this time, and I had moved to professional photography as my livelihood, as well as all the things CoffeeGeek brought me (consultations, professional writing, photography for the coffee industry). Our peak years (2008 through 2012) for the website saw us having over 1.3 million monthly visitors (650K uniques), with as many as 150 to 200 forum posts a day, ten active moderators, and as many as 10 to 15 consumer reviews published every day.
As the Internet changed and evolved, it became more and more difficult for us to evolve and change the website. I commissioned a complete website redesign in 2009, and it got as far as the page builds, but we discovered that migrating the forums would in effect double the cost of getting the project done.
In 2013, I tried again, hiring a new company, providing them with what I thought was a good budget, and they soon realised that the costs associated with migrating our forums, migrating our consumer reviews section, and delivering the kind of partner section (it’s a hidden, back end thing on CoffeeGeek) would effectively triple our budget. This 2013 phase also got about mid way through the design phase, and ended there.
In 2016, I revisited that 2013 design, and tried to work out ways I could get the project done without too much disruption. It still came down to the most complex parts of our website: the forums and the consumer reviews. Migrating all the other content on our website would be very easy by comparison. Even migrating over our membership, giving our members brand new tools (like individual blogs) was easy. Forums, consumer written reviews, and the partners section, all serious money sinks.
So in 2016, I acquiesced again. I started shopping around the idea to some big companies about possibly sponsoring those migrations (meaning “Introducing the new CoffeeGeek Forums, brought to you by Company XYZ”), and there was interest, but they also wanted some kind of editorial control, which I would never agree to.
For this entire time, I generally limited advertising on CoffeeGeek to companies within the Specialty Coffee sphere. Back in the ‘oughts, it was enough to maintain and run this website, but as things like Google Adsense and Facebook were born and grew, many of our old advertisers migrated to those platforms, leaving us behind. I had to find other income sources without sacrificing our core of being truthful and ethical in our ads, which I can tell you seriously handcuffed this website in terms of sustainable income. I had to introduce Amazon affiliate links in our consumer reviews section, just to pay for the site’s monthly hosting. I had to incorporate Google Adsense into our forums, just to pay for their load on our servers and website. And by doing these things, more advertisers in the specialty coffee realm dropped us and went to platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
And that is why this website looks like it’s stuck in the 2000s. It never generated enough income to facilitate a major, complete overhaul.
Why the Changes Now, in late 2020
This past summer, we had an absolute disaster occur with the website. Our main database server failed. We rent four physical servers through a US based company, to handle all the traffic our website has, and to run the archaic software (based on PHP4) that makes our website a reality. And the database server and hard drive failed rather spectacularly.
We pay the host for a full backup system, which they knew, so they disposed of the failed hard drive and instituted the backup recovery. This is when we found out that the backup system was never functional. For a decade. It did back up the website, and put online a CoffeeGeek website from 2012.
We did have an offsite backup, but it was from January of this year when my former Programmer was doing some routine maintenance and updates to our server software. So we got that back online, and I spent the next 40 days manually uploading all of this year’s content — about 30 major articles — but we lost all forum comments, all membership signups, all product reviews written by our membership between January and September of 2020.
This was the final straw. I had to make a major decision, which would lead to more major decisions. Do I retire CoffeeGeek.com since it barely makes enough money to pay its bills (I don’t draw a dime from the website). Do I just let it feebly crawl along, more and more broken? Or do I dive into my personal savings and just completely overhaul and modernize the website.
After many discussions with my friends, family, my wife and others, I decided to take the risky move of diving deep into my personal savings and overhaul and modernize the website.
But this also means more major decisions. Some are decisions people won’t be happy with. I set an absolute ceiling for what I’d pay out of my pocket to revive this website, and that budget meant a couple of big sacrifices.
CoffeeGeek Forums and Consumer Reviews
With the decision to overhaul the entire website and community, I had to make the hard decision to retire our forums. I based this decision on three things:
- Our forum participation is way down (though forum readership is steady). In the Forums’ heyday, we would enjoy as many as 200 posts a day, with an average of 150. Today, we’re lucky if we get five new posts, and often the majority of them are in the buy and sell forum.
- Our forums and the search of them are the biggest resource tax on our website. They account for about 75% of our server interactions and load. It means I have to have multiple servers to keep the website running smoothly.
- Migrating our forums would cost $10-$15K minimum. I won’t go into details, but because our forums are 100% custom software, migrating them to an off the shelf solution that still ties in with the membership functions of the rest of the new website would cost a minimum of $10,000 to do, and probably 50% more of that.
We have millions of postings in our forums dating back to 2003. The Aeropress, for example, was basically born in the CoffeeGeek forums. World Barista champions got their start in discussing specialty coffee and espresso in our forums. World class roasters, cuppers, coffee professionals started off their specialty coffee life in our forums.
And almost none of them participate or read there any longer.
All of this makes me sad. But it’s a decision I had to take. The forums will be retired, and will be hosted in an archive on the new website, to be searchable via google (to start), and in time, we may build a search index for it to be searched locally. But they will be retired.
The Consumer Reviews section is also a major investment to migrate over to the new website and modernize. But I believe, going forward, the CoffeeGeek website needs a consumer review section to stay true to its core.
So we’re making this migration and modernization part of our Phase Three stage of the CoffeeGeek website overhaul. I loosely project this to happen in 6 to 9 months. In the meantime, the existing reviews — all 6,500 of them — will be archived and available on the new website, in some format.
Now the Good News
The good news is that a brand new version of the CoffeeGeek website is coming soon, and I can promise you it will be true to the core and mission of the CoffeeGeek website.
On CoffeeGeek’s Terms and Conditions page (closest thing we have to an About Us page), we state this:
CoffeeGeek.com has two main goals with this website: to educate the coffee and espresso loving public, and to entertain and inform as best as we can. We strive for the highest levels of quality and integrity within this website and we encourage open, honest, frank, and above all else, respectful participation and communication between all our fellow CoffeeGeek members.
Open and honest discussion, participation and reviews are important to us, and help to inform people and generate better understanding for other readers and contributors; Regardless of your age, sex, race, or expertise, you have something to contribute and we want to hear it.
I realise at some point in our site’s evolution, I removed our mission statement, so I managed to dig it up in old notes. It reads:
The mission of the CoffeeGeek website is to provide a global meeting space for consumer and professionals who love great coffee. We are a community, and one that fosters discussion, debate, analysis, and even arguments regarding specialty coffee.
Our goal is to become the world’s premier source of discussion on everything related to specialty coffee, from making espresso to cleaning your popcorn popper coffee roaster, and every thing in between. We will strive to be your educational source on specialty coffee.
We will strive to be your informational source about new things in specialty coffee. We will strive to be your summer campfire where you can sit with like minded people, talking about your loves and passions for specialty coffee in an informal setting. We want to be your global specialty coffee community.
This is the goal with the 2020 overhaul of the CoffeeGeek website, just one year short of the website’s 20th anniversary.
I want some of the things we’re rolling out to be a surprise, so please, bear with me if I’m vague. What I can say is this: there is a new, absolutely major section coming to CoffeeGeek that we’ve never had before. I really hope you all will love it and enjoy it as much as I know I’ll enjoy bringing it to you.
We are also migrating over all our main content. That means all our
- Detailed Reviews
- Guides
- How Tos
- Quickshot Reviews
- First Looks
- Guest Articles
- Columnist Articles
- Masterclass Articles
Are coming to the new website, in new, more appealing layouts that are cross platform friendly.
We are introducing a brand new community section which will give you, our site members, a lot more control over the website and your interaction with it. You will be able to build your own landing page for CoffeeGeek, highlighting your favourite articles, reviews, and guides, and have them ready to read at a glance. There will be a new direct messaging system built right into the website so you can interact with other members you’re friendly with. A new site wide commenting system will still give you the full interaction you want with our writers and other website members. And if we can make it happen, we will be giving supporter members a lot more benefits, including your own CoffeeGeek hosted blog space, a new way to sell or buy used coffee products, and a lot more.
Three Phases of the New Website Roll Out
We’ve broken the redesign and relaunch of CoffeeGeek into three phases.
Phase One
The first phase is the design and launch of the brand new website, containing four of the six planned major sections: Articles, Reviews, Guides and How Tos, and a fourth section we’re keeping a surprise. Part of this phase includes migration of our membership lists and information, and all associated site information (like if a member is subscribed to our newsletter or not).
This work is already underway and I would say our design is about 90% complete. We will soon be running it on a test server, and working out our migration of existing content. Probably the biggest thing is getting our membership list migrated over as seamlessly as possible so you don’t need to do anything major the next time you log into CoffeeGeek with the new website.
We anticipate this will roll out in by February, 2021.
Phase Two
Phase Two is all about membership and our community section (the fifth of six sections on the new website). We plan on rolling out a massive community update that allows for multiple ways to interact and participate on CoffeeGeek in the way most people expect a community website to work in the year 2020. We’re also rolling out a weekly newsletter that will have exclusive content and even prizes for our newsletter subscribers.
(ed.note 2023: unfortunately, technical issues prevented us from bringing back our planned community features. In the near future, we will once again redesign CoffeeGeek (especially the back end) to remedy this.
We already have everything mapped out, and are in the midst of doing research into how to make our all planned stuff a reality. Expect this 2-3 months after the initial site relaunch.
Phase Three
Phase Three is all about migrating and reviving our consumer reviews section. We want to completely modernize the process of writing a product review, and have new ways to present them to our community and throughout the website. Again, a lot of this planning is already on paper, but we will begin to tackle the nuts and bolts of it once our Phase 2 is complete.
There is a caveat. If our website’s finances don’t improve before we complete phase 2, any future investment, including rolling out this phase 3 component, will be put on hold. I do hope within the next six months after launch, our website will be on a stable financial footing again.
Conclusion
It breaks my heart that we are retiring our forums. But it has to be done.
But I am very positive and even bullish about the future of this website. With the relaunch, you’re probably going to be seeing some famous names in specialty coffee — many of them early participants on this website — appearing again here. Our content production will be through the roof compared to recent years. It’s not just content for the sake of content, it’s going to be valuable, purpose driven, relevant content for coffee consumers and aficionados.
I hope you’ll come along for the new ride.
