Website Development » The Tech-Challenged

The New TKG.Com

Phil — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:28:41 +0000

Sometimes a new design is a great idea, while other times, dear sweet everything even remotely holy, maybe not so much. The good news is we’re pretty sure ours falls under the former.

You can probably guess by how often I’ve been blogging lately just how much I can come up with to write about this, so instead of trying and risking humiliating failure, I will instead direct you to what our professional writing-stuff-about-stuff people had to say about it, as well as list some quotes from the key people who actually built it about why the new site is so sweet:

Colin: Development Team Lead “I like the simplified homepage experience. It directs users to our major areas of interest so they don’t get lost. I think we made a more typographically engaging website, which is easier to read and digest.”

David: Senior Designer “It’s search engine optimized, user experience driven, and pretty darn cute… it’s custom tailored for our users based on statistical analysis and client feedback, we’re deploying a strategy that has been 10 years in the making. Looking good, being seen.”

Kyle: HTML Programmer “The new site is a lot more “clean” and more focused… I think it is more engaging overall with more of a doorway into our office instead of a window peek.”

… and new individual section designs are still being added to the site, so keep checking back. Hey, we might even fix my bio pic so that I no longer appear to have lost both of my eyes and then had the side of my forehead caved in by a shovel (which I presumably couldn’t dodge due to the aforementioned eye deficit).

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TKG Project Wins Award with Name Too Long for this Post Title

Phil — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:03:19 +0000

I’d like to take this moment (and this incredibly long sentence) to announce that Buckle Down Publishing’s website has won The Association of Educational Publisher’s 2008 Beacon Award for Excellence in Website / E-Commerce. The name kinda lost me there at the end, but I’m pretty sure that this means that we, as the developers of this site, did something good. Good for Buckle Down Publishing as well for conceiving (and constantly revewing and improving) a clear and strong vision for how their site should look and function to best serve their customers. And for giving us money. Definately never a bad idea to give us money.

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TKG Accepted as Judge for 2008 WebAwards

Phil — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:28:48 +0000

The Web Marketing Association’s WebAwards have added something new for 2008 – the critical eye of our own James Golden. Since 1997, these annual awards have recognized websites in 96 different industries for achievement and excellence in original design, technical development, functionality, SEO efforts and marketing campaigns. We figured we should get involved due to the organization’s goals of encouraging standards and rewarding innovation in the web industry (causes whose banners we have been known to raise from time to time). We gave them James as he is our own personal project critic. Once James is okay with it, it is certain that the client – being a mere mortal – will most assuredly approve.

We first became involved with the awards last year with the most positive of possible introductions – we won one (Outstanding Achievement in Website Development for Schumacher Homes). So this year James will join judges from 37 different countries and countless organizations (seriously, I tried) in determining who this year’s winners will be. This of course means that our projects are no longer eligible to win, but that’s a price we’re willing to pay to have James scrutinize someone else’s work for a few weeks.

If you have a site that you would like to nominate, click here , and hurry as the nomination process wraps up this Friday, June 13th.

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TKG Invited to Participate in ITT Tech’s Advisory Committee

Phil — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:37:12 +0000

I wasn’t sure how to go about trying to make this interesting or exciting, but now that I see the headline written out I can tell that I needn’t have worried – the thing practically jumps right off the page. Being invited to ITT Technical Institute’s next Advisory Committee board meeting might not sound like alot of fun to you, but our own Mr. Golden is pretty excited about it. This invitation will allow The Karcher Group the chance to help guide the ever-evolving corriculum for the School of Information Technology – an opportunity that a) gives us the ear of the people teaching our future employees (regarding issues such as having pop-ups on your homepage and building your site in Cold Fusion…), and b) furthers our work with the movement to keep technology-minded young people living and working in Northeast Ohio. Fun indeed people, fun indeed.

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June SEO Seminar and Workshop in Columbus – So Close, You Can Already Smell the Dry-Erase Markers

Phil — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:56:40 +0000

Just a quick reminder that our next SEO seminar and workshop is rapidly approaching. This one will be in Columbus on June 13th (special early bird pricing is available until June 1st), and will continue the theme of our 2008 series of SEO seminars – giving people information and techniques that they can actually go back to their job and use. This latest seminar and workshop will also include this year’s goal of limited class size to encourage questions and interaction with the presenters. Dates, times, pricing and location are as follows:

Friday, June 13, 2008
9:00 AM-2:00 PM (Seminar)
2:00 PM-4:00 PM (Workshop)
Doors open at 8:30 AM, lunch is provided
Business Technology Center (by OSU)
1275 Kinnear Rd.
Columbus, Ohio 43212
Seminar $249.00
Seminar + Workshop $399.00

I could write out the details for the activities and stuff here, but someone was already forced to do that for our site so I’ll direct you there instead. Want to see some less-than-flattering head shots of people who will be speaking there? Bam, there you go. Wondering if the seminar is right for you? Wonder no longer. Wanna see a baby chipmunk? What’s up now? Don’t even try to test me today – I’ve got the text links code on my clipboard and I can hit Ctrl V without even looking down at my hands.

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The Karcher Group is one of “Ten Most Dependable” of 2008

Phil — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:55:28 +0000

That’s right, The Karcher Group has been selected as one of the Ten Most Dependable Web Designers of the Central U.S. for 2008 by Entrepreneur Magazine. Speaking as the sole company from Ohio included this year, we would like to say “sweet”, and “thanks for noticing”. So what criteria was met to make the cut?

5+ Years of Industry Experience: They seemed to find our doubling of that sufficient
15+ Web Sites Per Year: Check
50+ Clients: How does 500 grab ya?

Though we of course remain humble, we would like to take this opportunity to say “go us”. So check out our award-winningly-dependable Web design, and remember that our custom programming, hosting, colocation, marketing and SEO services are pretty darn stalwart as well.

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It’s Official – The Karcher Group is now at TKG.com

Phil — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:35:02 +0000

As promised last week, we now have officially taken over the domain tkg.com. Is has already proven to be easier to remember and fits better on a pen their our previous address, and as such I am willing to declare this a good thing. So check it out as soon as you have a chance – it looks exactly the same, but now the address bar has a lot less letters in it.

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TheKarcherGroup.com has Acquired the Rarest of Online Commodities – the 3 Letter Domain

Phil — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:45:06 +0000

That’s right, starting early next week, we are moving to TKG.com. It’s the Web industry equivalent of moving to a new office. I have no idea where to go with that… okay, it’s nothing like changing offices at all whatsoever, except suddenly you are handing out pens with the wrong address on them. This is still pretty exciting though as three letter domains do have one key feature in common with prime real estate; it’s not like they can make any more of them.

So after ten years of pursuit (the last three of which have been outright courtship), we all have new email addresses and the lives of the poor souls in SEO are now over for the foreseeable future. For a better explanation of these recent exciting events and the (dire) consequences for our SEO personnel, feel free to go over my head and read what our owner had to say about the pending domain switch to TKG.com.

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CWSA to Save Aspiring Web Developers from Themselves, Others

Phil — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:19:45 +0000

In anything, it is of course easier to learn good habits early on than to unlearn a bunch of bad habits later – though it was still funny when I was two and Dad spent weeks teaching me that the word for absolutely everything was “helicopter�? (pronounced “he’we-copper�? in the vernacular of the age deficient) in preparation for Christmas dinner and the rest of my family’s amusement. For those of you who wish to learn good habits in Web development from the beginning without all the nifty soul-crushing humiliation, the Cleveland Web Standards Association is starting a regular study group for people with zero to intermediate developer knowledge (see what I did there, ending the opening paragraph with the actual topic sentence? Inverted pyramid be damned).

Once again, the CWSA has done a better job of describing their event than I can so please check here for details. I will say that the initial meeting is a two-parter, the first part of which was actually last Sunday, but you can still make it to the concluding meeting this Sunday, February 24^th at 5:00pm at Caribou Coffee in Rocky River.Why would I fail to post this before the initial meeting? Because I can’t just sit here being focused and vigilant all day on the off-chance that someone somewhere decides to schedule something. I have things to do, people. Important things. Like partaking in intense psychotherapy over the whole helicopter incident.

Beginner developers should also check out the TKG Institute, our ongoing evening program here at The Karcher Group for teaching developer basics tothe youth of Northeast Ohio that are in to that kind of thing.

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Cleveland Web Standards Get a New Home

Phil — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:44:01 +0000

The Cleveland Web Standards Association has (appropriately enough) launched their own site, which you should feel beyond compelled to check out here.

The CWSA is a group of Web developers from around the Cleveland area that meet on a monthly basis to discuss goals and methods for establishing standards in site development, both present and future – or as their site succinctly states, “In short, we’re making Cleveland suck less, one website at a time�?. First Northeast Ohio, then the Midwest, then the whole damn country, baby. The Tim Conway of Web standards organizations, you might say. But you probably wouldn’t. I already can’t believe that I just did. I probably should have gone with Michael Stanley…

Anyway, if you are a Cleveland-area Web developer who would like to learn more about current standards and help set future ones in a less-than-formal atmosphere, check out their site and then get signed up here.

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