Four years is a good run: why Offbeat Families is ceasing publication (and how it will live on)

Over the years, I’ve made no secret of the fact that Offbeat Families (formerly known as Offbeat Mama) has been a challenge. The site launched in September of 2009, and I invested four years and about $40,000 toward growing the site into a sustainable, financially viable business. Ultimately, these efforts have failed. Offbeat Families will no longer be producing new posts.

STYLED SHOOT: Unicorns and rainbows

On Monday, I wrote about why we never featured styled shoots on Offbeat Bride… mainly because I don’t want brides being mislead by marketing materials into unrealistic expectations for their weddings.

Here on Offbeat Empire, however, I love scheming about small business stuff like marketing… so I have a styled shoot I HAVE to share.

How we do stock photography

Can you run-down how you guys handle posting your stock photos for each site? I know you use Creative Commons most of the time, but what are your criteria for picking photos? Do you maintain a database of photos that you think might work with future articles, just to cut down on time, or do you search and hope for the best?

The Dark Day of September 5, 2013, and our brand new server

We’re still recovering from our epic outage, which lasted from about 8pm PST September 4th until 4am PST September 6th. By several magnitudes, this was the longest downtime we’ve had in our 7 years of publishing. That shit was brutal. After troubleshooting on the old server for 20 hours, we decided to abandon ship and move to a brand new server. So far, it’s sparkly and doing well.

I’ve been using the Offbeat Empire’s Facebook page to keep everyone updated, but now that offbeatempire.com is back online (on an entirely new server, built from scratch) I’ll update this post with updates as we have them.