Archive for February, 2010

Most people seem ready to leave the rocky year that was 2009 in the past. For those in business, it was a year of smaller revenues and sometimes even downsizing. In a chat with our banker Brad Mayer at American Chartered Bank, we agreed that in 2009, “flat was the new up.”

Table XI was very fortunate last year. In the worst economic climate in decades, we managed to pick up some new clients and add a new member to the team. We closed 2009 with our busiest end-of-year push since we launched in 2002. Summarily, we kept moving in the right direction.

Beyond dumb luck or good karma, we attribute our success in 2009 to several factors:

• A diversified client base. Drawing revenues from varied industries leaves us less vulnerable to rough periods in one sector.
• We know organizations must do more with less. We prove our worth to our clients by showing them how to use technology to be more efficient.
• Buyers continue to flock to the web. We help organizations meet potential customers online.

In the words of hip-hop phenom Fabolous, we’re “getting better year by year, like they say wine do,” and we’re proud of what we accomplished in 2009. We offer sincere thanks to everyone who helped us this year. We’re looking forward to 2010.

A few months ago, we added Samantha Arnold to our team. As our first dedicated project manager, she’ll be cracking the whip to ensure we stay on task, budget, and deadline.

Before coming to Table XI, Samantha was a senior project and release manager for Harpo Productions, where she was responsible for executing software releases and infrastructure upgrades for Oprah.com. Rumor has it Samantha’s departure from Harpo was the final straw in Oprah’s decision to quit her TV show and leave Chicago.

Samantha has also worked in project management roles at howstuffworks.com, mobiletravelguide.com and consumerguide.com. She received her B.A. in History from Valparaiso University, then studied history at the University of Notre Dame. For those who are interested, she’d be happy to highlight the consequences of improper logistical planning by using Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 as a case study.

If she’s not biking around Chicago with her family (she recently rode into the office when it was four degrees outside!), she’s catching up on the Volvo Ocean Race, Nebraska football, or hiding out in a used bookstore. And no, she can’t get you tickets to an Oprah taping.

We’ve had lots of success working with organizations we affectionately call “sleepy manufacturers”: small to mid-sized, decades-old and often family-owned companies that make specialty products. Our longest-standing client, Dickson, is the industry leader in chart recorders and data loggers and was founded in 1923. A newer client, Chicago Dryer, first presented its room-sized linen-drying machines at the Colombian Exposition in 1893.

To reach out to other such organizations, we joined the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago (ICNC). We have spent time over the last few months running seminars on web technology and offering free consulting to some of its 400 members.

We’ve also had the pleasure of meeting some fascinating companies sitting right under our noses. Just two miles west of our office is Kelly Tube Systems, founded in 1904 — one of the first companies in the USA to manufacture pneumatic tube systems that continue to be used in banking, manufacturing, and retail today.  A couple of blocks further west is Prevue Pet — a substantial family-owned manufacturer of specialty pet cages and other pet products.

We’re looking forward to meeting even more unique local business owners — and helping them harness the Internet to increase sales, cut costs, and meet the challenges of the 21st century.

As a consulting company, we help our clients find technical solutions that bring the best returns on their investments. For clients with complex needs, the solution is sometimes best delivered through custom software. For those with more generic needs, we regularly use off-the-rack software, saving us from duplicating past efforts and helping keep cost low.

WordPress, which we seem to use more all the time, is an open-source product — means the software is free and users can customize it in any way they see fit. It gained popularity as a blogging tool but in the last few years has grown into a full-featured content management system that competes with Drupal, Joomla and other major players. It was voted the2009 Best Open-Source CMS.

WordPress is an excellent platform on which to develop sites with relatively little dynamic front-end functionality. We built and launched gailgoldenconsulting.com with WordPress earlier this year, leveraging the platform’s easy-to-use interface which allows non-technical users to update content, post stories, and add images to the site. At the other end of the spectrum, we launched a private intranet for the YMCA of Metro Chicago that involved writing custom code on top of the platform. The end result was a virtual water cooler for the organization’s 3,000 employees across the Chicago metro area.

As always, we continue to be on the lookout for new technologies that help make our lives a little easier. While WordPress is not a perfect fit for all content management needs, it has served us and our clients well — and it’s the choice for wedding sites for John, Josh, Jordan and Greg (who just got engaged in January).