Hello there. I'm George Nowell. I have headed up T.G.N. Associates, Inc. since its formation in 1993. Back then, we were very involved in the telecommunications industry, hanging T-1s on walls and things of that sort. Then along came the Internet, and we jumped in with both feet.

We specialize in freelance web development and light duty code writing for select clients whose needs may vary from full design and maintenance to framework development where the client's intent is to provide content updates on their own schedule.

In the early days of the Internet, we worked with companies like the iMALL selling 1- and 3-page 'websites', which were really just brochures. Obviously, things have changed radically since then, but our core business has always been showing small businesses how to market effectively on the Web.

Our approach to working with you is to function as a business consultant. Of course, you know what a consultant is. That's a guy that gets paid to tell you things you already knew and would rather not hear again. So I guess we're a little different in that regard. We may still tell you stuff you don't want to hear, but we charge only for providing the services on the back end, whether it's just a couple of hours or a few days' worth.

In the long run, you'll find our services costing far less than you would spend on a dedicated web-developer employee. (Entrusting your business' image to your cousin Fred might not be the greatest idea, either, unless he's really good at this stuff and can explain it to you in a way that doesn't make your eyes glaze over.) Continue doing what you're good at, and put yourself, your assistant, or your marketing people in charge of creating the message on your website and updating it as the need arises.

The days of using the Internet as a replacement for printed advertising are long gone as you know, and the use of what's called Web 2.0 and social networking drives effective marketing now. It's a 2-way street, and we'll show you how to use your Internet presence to greatly enhance your ability to listen to what your customers and clients want and need and then provide it to them, profitably. Done correctly, you can create tremendous synergy. Done incorrectly and your customers will wonder "what the he**?"

Before you peruse our Products & Services page, please accept one humble piece of advice. Do not, under any circumstances, let a web developer buy your domain name! I can't even count the number of clients who have entrusted this task to a developer, discovered that the developer owned the domain name and only he or she could change any of the details, like where the site resided, who could update it, and for how much, and then sought our help to fix the problem.

For many of the same reasons, we recommend that you set up your own hosting account. Two hosting companies with which we have had great success are Host Gator and Surpass Hosting. Host Gator has a bit of a leg up on Surpass in the area of customer service, in our opinion, but both companies offer you the same basic setup for pretty much the same cost. We recommend that that you request to have your hosting account set up on a Linux server. For some very technical reasons, we do not recommend using GoDaddy for hosting your site, although their domain services can't be beat.

Our next piece of free advice is more of a plea. If you decide to build your own website, do NOT use what are called 'mailto' links. It's a really easy thing to do with most web design software, free or otherwise, and it's absolutely guaranteed to increase your spam load. There are so many easy ways to prevent email harvesting programs from harvesting your email addresses that there is simply no excuse for using mailto links any longer.