Talks From March 2009
Announcing TXILife.com
As part of our ongoing efforts to enthrall and enlighten our friends/clients/hangers-on, as well as to provide an opportunity for our employees to engage directly with the outside world, we’ve launched a new blog entitled TXI Life.
As opposed to our corporate blog (which is basically our newsletter archive), this site focuses on what it’s like to work at Table XI. Additionally, we will post technical tips and tricks that will appeal to some, but not all of the readership of our newsletter.
For now, it’s mostly photos of the delicious meals cooked for us by our office manager Ellen, who has taken over for our series of (relatively short-tenured) chefs but we hope to be adding more meaty content (pardon the pun) down the road.
Please note that TXI Life is written by our employees and is not edited, so caveat emptor.
This message comes to you carbon-offset
Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been working with a consultant to develop Table XI’s environmental policy. We were looking for guidance in avoiding, reducing, and offsetting our company’s environmental impact.
We’re fortunate that many of our employees are already environmentally-conscious consumers. While January earned the dubious honor of being the tenth coldest on record, some still diligently biked to work and most took public transit. As an organization, simple changes at the office — providing reusable coffee mugs, switching to compact florescent lights, cooking instead of ordering out — represent small steps towards mitigating our impact and cause relatively minor inconvenience at a reasonable cost.
We’re a business and we seek to grow. But in order to achieve growth that is sustainable, prices must represent the entire cost of doing business, which includes external environmental effects. While we haven’t reached a regulatory paradigm in the United States that internalizes these costs by law, we’ve jumped the gun and done our best to put our money where our mouth is.
After doing our best to reduce our environmental impact, we’ve offset our 2008 carbon emissions and challenge you to do the same.
Another Addition to Our Team
Daniel Strabley: our newest hire
Every day we seem to read about some big company slashing jobs by the thousands. For many, times are extraordinarily tough, but at Table XI, things seem to be holding steady. We believe the future is bright — especially for small business — and have continued to invest and grow.
To that end, we’ve actually added another capable staffer to our team since our last communique. We are excited to announce the addition of Daniel Strabley to our team of 12. While it’s only been a few months, it’s hard to remember what life was like before he joined us!
Daniel comes to us from closerlook, a design studio focused on the pharmaceutical industry, and represents the first full-time graphics designer that Table XI has ever employed. For the first 6+ years of our existence, we worked closely with a number of freelancers, but never felt we had sufficient work to warrant a full-time designer. Boy were we wrong…
Since mid-November, Daniel has dramatically improved the way we work by improving our design process, and by bringing his sizable HTML implementation skills to our clients’ projects. His presence means our engineers can spend their time focused on functionality without having to sweat the vagaries of the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 bugs (Microsoft browsers are notoriously non-compliant with Internet standards. For more info, check out this post from a previous newsletter).
Daniel has also been hugely helpful to our sales and marketing efforts. He has helped us augment our materials with pictures that replace a thousand words, created proposal and presentation templates, and begun the process of organizing all of the graphic material we use. Best yet, we’re quite sure we’ll find even more uses for his numerous talents as we further understand his capabilities.
Relaunching Gradesaver
One of the interesting things that happens when you work with the same customers for a long time is being part of a website’s entire lifecycle.
In early 2005, we helped Gradesaver, a client specializing in online education services, rebuild their former site*. Their market is a competitive one and the new site made an immediate impact on revenue. At the same time, we helped them streamline the site’s development and content management, as well as the payment of the writers and editors that provide the company’s editing services.
By early 2008, Gradesaver’s competitors had made major strides forward revamping their own sites. The old version of Gradesaver.com* was starting to seem a bit dated, and growth had stagnated. We suggested a systematic facelift of the front end of the site to restructure their content, URLs, and navigation in a way that would improve the experience for users and improve the site’s search engine rankings.
We launched the new version of Gradesaver.com* at the end of last year. The new site is highly search-optimized, and represents page-by-page analysis of the way users find and interact with the huge body of content the company has developed.
The site is still new, but its preliminary results have been encouraging. Many of the terms we chose for optimization have met with improved search engine ratings, and more of the people who visit the site are making purchases, despite the state of the economy.
While there is still room for refinement, we are excited with the progress, and looking forward to an exciting 2009. We thank our clients Nick and Olivia as well as Table XI team members John, Matt, Rich, and Jordan for all of their tireless efforts rebuilding the site!
* the archived versions of the site are displayed courtesy of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine which can supply endless hours of kitschy Internet amusement
The Atom Smashers
Regular readers of the Table XI newsletter have come to expect a technological tip or trick from us in each of these emails. However, instead of suggesting a product to you this month, we are going to suggest a movie — The Atom Smashers. Produced by our close friend and sometimes collaborator Andrew Suprenant, Executive Director of 137 Films, the award-winning science documentary tracks the search for the Higgs Boson at Fermilab, a government-funded research facility west of Chicago.
For the uninitiated, the Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle whose existence has been widely postulated by theoretical physicists, but whose existence has never been demonstrated through experimentation. Often referred to as the “God Particle,” it is believed to be the mechanism by which matter has mass. The film covers the search, the science, the politics, and the lives of the scientists doing the research.
The Atom Smashers aired on PBS as part of their Independent Lens series, was premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has been shown at other festivals around the world. You can purchase a copy of the film directly from the 137 Films web site, or you can contact Andrew if you’d like to learn more. The film is also available for screening at schools and universities, and we highly encourage you to introduce it to the innovative educators in your life.
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