Chef Seattle, Changing Gears
Well, this is somewhat bad news, but even after our recent name change from Coffee.net to Chef Seattle, it looks like we’re going to be slowing down work on the website. With the slowing economy, especially in the restaurant and advertising industry, it’s been a bit of a double whammy for us here at Chef Seattle. Even with dramatic drop in advertising budgets, we had hoped to get creative with some really unique promotions to help both restaurants and readers.
Unfortunately, we were given a rude surprise last month when Chef Seattle was apparently penalized by Google. We at Chef Seattle have worked extremely hard over the last year to build links with relevant and trusted websites, while creating useful and genuine content - so this was a huge shock to us. Penalized websites are generally bottom of the barrel websites that trick users or engage in spammy tactics, so we’re both dumbfounded and surprised as to why this happened.
Our only guess is that it is related to a few links we purchased on the advice of a local SEO firm we hired in the last two months, but the scope is so small that we still can’t rationalize it. We’re linked to by the City of Seattle, King County, the University of Washington, non-profits, the PI and awesome local food blogs. We never paid for any of those links and in our entire history, have only paid for three links as part of advertising deals, not including directories. Yet, we’ve fallen on the bad side of Google.
As a result of the Google penalty, our traffic has dropped to a trickle. We can no longer charge our advertisers in good faith, so our revenues are now gone. Without the ability to pay employees, server bills or expensive dinner bills we’ve decided that this is the time to trim the fat.. along with the meat. Steve is saying farewell, new reviews are on hold and our dedicated servers will be moving to a cheaper, but slower alternative. In essence, Chef Seattle is now down to my own personal hobby.
All in all, it’s made for a depressing holiday season to see over a year of work reduced to nothing. We spent over two months working on our website to pass stringent WCAG 2.0 (Web Consortium of Accessibility Guidelines) standards, making us the only foodie website that is compatible with physically or visually impaired web visitors (try navigating CitySearch with your keyboard then try Chef Seattle). We were also the only food site that operated as a social venture organization - donating money to charities even though it put us in the red. So, for what it’s worth, we felt we did some good for a few people while it lasted.
Personally, I can say that I’ve learned a lot over the last year. I started the project only knowing basic HTML and can now code compliant, cross-browser XHTML and CSS on the fly. I also learned how to write fast, secure php and optimized mysql databases. I spent sleepless nights figuring out Linux and BSD, but eventually got around to that, with lots of help from my friends at Wow Rack, the guys who host Chef Seattle. But most of all, I met some great people, ate out at fantastic restaurants and had a great time doing so.
All good things must end however, so I guess this project just came to a halt sooner than expected. I suppose I could be angry at Google, but I’ve always lived with the belief that thing happen for a reason. Having the insight to see that reason has always been the tricky part.
I will still make blog posts here and there, but otherwise, it’s been fun! Best wishes for the new year everyone. :)
