We were brought in by JLZ Communications to work with print designer D’Arcy Chiapetta on a new web presence for Delco Foods. Together we created a very unique site that not only looks fantastic, but provides great information that makes your mouth water.

In addition to being pleasant to the visitors, the site’s admin tool allows the marketing team to add news items and recipes, and update information as their content changes. This makes changes quick and easy without the need for TGFI to make updates for them.

Buon appetito!

We were first contacted by Just1Word to provide some help with Ruby on Rails programming and server setup. A few weeks into the project the goals were changing and the future was looking a lot brighter.

Research shows that 14-25 year olds consume information constantly. They do it online and they do it with their friends. If you want to get their attention, you have to go where they are and passively get them involved.

We started by changing the information architecture of the Bible. We de-emphasized the reading aspect and brought forth the social. As a key differentiator from all other Bible sites, we grouped the information into thousands of new topics and stories. You’d be surprised how many strange and comical ways people died in the Bible.

They’re also keeping up with people on Facebook and Twitter. On their first day after relaunching, they gained over 1,000 followers on Twitter. People are asking questions and they’re getting great feedback. It’s a precious dialogue of trust that you just can’t buy in the offline world. They’re being rewarded for it with referrals and repeat visits many times over.

Chris has also been search engine optimizing pages to make sure that people looking for Bible verses can find what they need quickly. As of last check, Google had indexed over 60,000 pages. When we’re finished we’ll be at nearly one million pages of unique content.

The next step is developing a Facebook application to get people involved and sharing the Bible between friends.

It’s an ambitious goal, but they’re off to a great start.

One of the biggest issues we’ve had is properly dealing with the simple trio of search engine optimization: titles, descriptions and keywords. There are some really good tools out there, but all of them have issues or just aren’t kept up anymore.

Lately it’s become more and more evident that we needed something custom. We were willing to pay for it, but none of the authors of those existing tools would get back to us. So, this past week we took it into our own hands. We created the TGFI.net SEO Plugin for Wordpress.

Right out of the gate it does title, description and keyword overrides for greater control over search engine readability. We plan on adding more features, such as navigation control, in the future, so stay tuned!

We worked with them to refine the design for the web and automated several areas including the feedback form and flash gallery. It’s a very unique site for a specific purpose, and I have to say it came together very well. The next step is a similar implementation for thier main site, cripephoto.com.

Various members of my family have been using Bill Cripe’s services for years, and it’s great to help others learn about his incredible work. Next time your at the office, I’ll be showing off the pictures of my son and daughter. You won’t believe what he can do with a 4 week old…

TGFI has been a bit different in that respect. I was so head down in getting work done for customers and running the company, that I didn’t have time to reflect on it. Now that we’ve grown a bit, I can finally step back and breathe.

Indianapolis has been a great place to work, and I’ve done so with some incredibly talented people. As a collective, I’ve just never felt we’ve been able to break out and let the rest of the world know about it. Fortunately that seems to be changing as of late.

We’ve picked up some new projects with out of state funding, along with a few national campaigns for locally based companies. As an example, we just very quickly helped launch one for AuthorHouse at http://www.authorsacrossamerica.com/. There’s more coming, but you’ll just have to wait until they are ready!

As we talk around with our friends, this seems to be a trend for others as well that could help put Indy on the map. ExactTarget is probably the most well known web company here in town, but there are several others that are trying to help out. We used to share space with the guys who are working on the new search engine ChaCha. Two of my former co-workers, Chris Baggott (ExactTarget co-founder) and Ali Sales (ExactTarget, ChaCha) just announced that they are starting a new company, Compendium Software, to fix the broken gap with corporate blogging software.

Could this be a sign of changing times for Indy? I hope so. Now if only we can get the local VC’s to help out…

Though aimed at the PMICIC membership community – anyone can join, and use, the PMICIC.org website. Stop by today!

Also, we would love to talk to anyone about our experience with developing this website in Ruby on Rails, including our views on Ruby in general, and the learning curve for switching to Rails specifically. Drop me a line at .

We have numerous ideas that we are working on, but we are launching the site slowly to make sure things run as smoothly as possible for our customers. They currently have about 2700 products online from 3 manufacturers, but will be adding many more lines in the coming months.

Stop over today as they are currently running prices at 5% below their competitors!