Moving Towards a New CoffeeGeek

The New CoffeeGeek Here’s how the Speedster First Look, published in 2009, will look on the new CoffeeGeek website.

We are just weeks away now from the complete relaunch of the CoffeeGeek website, after four months of furious design, building, coding, and migrating content. Today, I’ll share some screen shots with you and walk all of you loyal site visitors through some of the processes involved.

If you read my last article on this subject, you’ll know that some very hard decisions had to take place to move this website and all its information — historical, and currently valid, both — into what people expect from a community and education website in 2021. We had to leave behind our forums component, and at least temporarily leave behind our consumer reviews section as well.

We are able to bring you some exciting new things, even in the Phase One rollout of the website, and a lot of features that have been demanded for years. Here’s some of the major changes.

A Whole New Look

The entire website gets a brand new look and feel, with a heavy emphasis on big, bold visual images and elements. When you visit a How To page, you’ll see a key, feature photo right away that leaves no doubt what the guide is about. On top of that, we’ve thoroughly vetted and in some cases updated the content in many of the older How Tos on CoffeeGeek to bring your fresh visuals and updated information on how to do the things prescribed in the How Tos. Here’s a lightbox sample of just some of them:

All our product reviews got the same treatment, and have their own unique look and feel. We updated several current products, and even brought over some historical reviews, like the Rancilio Silvia, Speedster, and even the very first review ever posted on CoffeeGeek, the Hario Nouveau Siphon coffee maker. Reviews also get other new features, including a feature photo gallery, inline navigation, and we’re right up front with review scores, recommended status, and even pros and cons for all products.

Here’s three samples of Reviews and First Looks on the new website.

Photographs and some content updates aren’t the only thing re-energised for the new website. Here’s just some of the minor and major changes we’ve applied.

• Tags, tags everywhere. We’re making use of tags in a big way on the new website, so you can cycle down to the specific content you want to read about and discover more of.
• Each major section gets its own colour theme and font family. We want you to know what part of the website you’re on, instinctively, so we’ve applied specific font families and colour schemes to each major section. For instance, reviews have Burnt Sienna as their primary colours, and the Roboto font families as their primary fonts for titles, text, captions, and other elements.
• Inline Navigation helps you get around. In our longer articles, like QuickShot Reviews and First Looks, you’ll find an inline navigation graphical menu on the left side of the page that floats as you scroll down. Hover over an icon on the nav menu and you’ll see a tooltip describing the section within the article it will take you to.
• A search that works. Long the achilles heel of the old CoffeeGeek website, our new one has a supercharged search engine that works great. Tied in with tags, you should always be able to find the specific content you want.
• A smarter footer. The new footer element for the entire website is a lot smarter and dynamic, focusing on new content, but also providing a site map to the entire website.
• Social media is now baked in. Every page, every blog post, ever article, every guide has ways to share content on all major social media platforms, and reminds you that CoffeeGeek is active on these platforms as well. In addition, you’ll be able to print content, and email content.

These are some of the more “micro” changes, stylistic changes and improvements. We also have some major changes in how this website is delivered and what it’s content goals and sections are, which I’ll get into next.

Major Website Design and Structure Changes

There’s a few things with the new website I want to focus on.

Responsive Design

The most important change for the #newCG CoffeeGeek website is how it will be an extremely responsive website, one that looks great no matter what platform you’re on – desktop, tablet, or mobile. We’ve paid special attention to mobile and tablet in this redesign, checking and verifying that every single page on the website looks gorgeous on both platforms. It makes designing and editing the website a bit more difficult (if you’re familiar with doing these kinds of designs, you “show” and “hide” certain elements based on the platform it’s being viewed on, but while designing these elements, you see them all, stacked on top of each other).

Mobile-friendly has long been a complaint of folks visiting CoffeeGeek. Hopefully that complaint will be completely gone in a few weeks.

The Blog

(NB – the image to the right is how one of our formal columnist articles looks on the new website). We first thought about launching a blog on CoffeeGeek back in 2007. We just couldn’t build that into the old CMS engine that runs this website. Then some popular coffee blogs came along in the mean time and occupied that space on the Internet.

So why are we incorporating a blog now?

Because I’ve always felt the popular coffee blogs online don’t serve the historical and current market that CoffeeGeek does. One popular blog serves as an industry blog (and often an industry advertising platform with mostly positive content); another covers barista events and coffee events and again, seems to have all its content driven with the purpose of making its advertisers happy. Neither really seemed to speak to consumers of specialty coffee in a straightforward way, providing specific news that specialty coffee consumers want to read and talk about (at least as their primary mission). And neither offered an international focus on specialty coffee that this website has historically tried to do.

We also have had an opinions section that many folks have called a “blog”, over the years. I have to be honest, I’ve always bristled at that. Our Opinions section is filled with 1200, 1500, 2000 word, well researched and well thought out posts that were more like feature magazine articles than a 15-30 minute blog post. And that got me thinking.

This is where CoffeeGeek can be unique with a blog. Treat our blog as our daily newspaper, as our place where pertinent information and opinions are shared in a fun, short and entertaining fashion, and keep our Opinions columns as our feature, “weekend magazine” section. There’s so many things we did not cover on the old CoffeeGeek because they just weren’t detailed or long enough to have as an opinion article. Literally thousands of bits of content I know our readers would have liked to read.

Now, on the #newCG, we have that structure. And we have 35 blogger candidates ready to take part in creating this new content for you to read on a daily basis.

The Newsletter

CoffeeGeek has had a newsletter. In fact, 27,000 of our members opted into it over the past 17 years. We just never utilized it much. This is changing with the #newCG.

We will have a newsletter editor and will be putting out a weekly newsletter that focuses on three things.

• Highlighting new content on the CoffeeGeek website
• Original content exclusive to the newsletter
• Newsletter specific contests, giveaways and promotional features

We have the structure in place but are still shopping around for a good editor (hint,if this is something you’re interested in and have good writing / editing / design experience, I want to hear from you).

The Podcast

Yes, we are bringing back the podcast. It won’t be part of the launch of #newCG, but will be appearing within a month or two of the new website launch. And there were challenges with this. First and foremost, I lost most of the audio for the past 72 podcast episodes.

Way back in 2009, I paid Libsyn.com a lifetime hosting fee to host the CoffeeGeek podcast. But at some point, Libsyn changed hands or structure, and they arbitrarily deleted all the podcasts and our hosting pages from the website in 2017.

When I was planning on bringing the podcast back, I really wanted all those archival episodes, so I put a plea out on Twitter, and people responded. Several folks went and dug up old iPods, old iTunes hard drives, and mined them to find the old episodes of the CoffeeGeek podcast, which they forwarded to me. Further, Internet Archive had most of the episodes saved for posterity, though they were locked down and hidden because the copyright holder (me) did not grant permission for them to be public-accessible. I got in touch with Internet Archive, and within hours, they unlocked all the old audio, making them all downloadable.

I grabbed everything, and rebuilt all the show notes and information, and posted them all to Anchor where you can now hear them all again. In addition, they are listed now on Spotify, on Google Podcasts, and other services.

Now that the historical episodes are set up, and I have a venue once again to publish new episodes, they will be coming soon.

Wrap Up

As of this writing, we are only weeks away (maybe as little as 2) from the launch of the new CoffeeGeek website. You won’t see consumer reviews or the forums on the new website, and the ability to comment and participate with your words is delayed (both are coming), but I hope you will enjoy the new website and it’s new, expanded way to share the joy and adventure of specialty coffee as a consumer. I can’t wait to show it all to you!