So, that was a rather awkward an unexpected layoff.

The good news is, though, that after a week of trying to get our Web host provider to figure out where they had put our lost database, the TOG Solutions site is back and fully functional.

And not a moment too soon. Due to our technical issues, we had to delay our Countdown to OpenOffice 3.2 temporarily, but we’ll be wrapping that up next Wednesday with all of the changes that will be featured with their Base program. And, as part of the public release, we will present a special Monday OpenOffice post on December 14th.

Our regular articles dedicated to digital media. online community management and career advice will also be back on track. And because it is Friday, we’ve got a Changing Your Game post on tap, so stay tuned!

For those of you who are regular visitors to the TOG Solutions site, we appreciate your patience and thank you for your continued support. It’s been a difficult year for all of us, no doubt. Hopefully, our technical difficulties serve as a signal that the worst is behind us, and good things are coming in the year ahead!

As always, we are here to help you with any of your needs, so feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Define irony: Posting a blog article about how social media is about trial and error, then, soon after, you made an error with your own.

That’s kind of how it went down on Friday, the day after we put up When Your Fans Turn Against You. I had the opportunity to speak with Susie Hall at Aquent, the organization whose Facebook activity was the subject of that article. While we were pleasantly surprised by their openness and receptiveness towards bettering their efforts, we ended up finding a shortcoming on our end.

If you have wanted the opportunity to post a comment on the TOG Solutions blog, you have likely found it difficult to do so. And that was because we asked you to log in.

Log in to what, you ask? Well, since we use WordPress for our site, anyone who has an account with WordPress.com would have no problem posting a comment. Those with no such credentials? It would have been a problem. Plus, from what we could tell, it looked to be kind of hard to figure out how to go about getting an account.

So, to fix that, we’ve went ahead on our end and did away with the need for you to have a WordPress.com account for comments. So, if there was an post that you wanted to weigh in on, we encourage you to do so.

It’s been a good news/bad news day for TOG Solutions. The good news, as many you have seen, is that The Statement, our free newsletter, is back and was sent out to our subscribers. If you are interested in receiving out newsletter, please feel free to submit your e-mail address on the form on the right.

The bad news, it would appear, is that all of our recipients that happen to use AT&T as their e-mail provider didn’t get their copy of The Statement. Why? Because evidently, AT&T has taken the liberty of blacklisting the togsolutions.com mail server.

Normally, we’d go ahead and let this slide, submit a request through the AT&T Postmaster and be done with it. Unfortunately, we can’t really stay silent, especially since AT&T is the e-mail provider for a great deal of users in our services areas.

So, you can imagine our surprised to see the same error message dozens of times, including a bounce-back message from our personal e-mail addresses (We’ve been an Ameritech/AT&T DSL customer for several years).

Trying to grow as we are, it’s essential that we have the opportunity to maintain contact with everyone who is interested in learning more about TOG Solutions and the services we provide. Having our e-mail server blocked, however, hampers our ability to do that.

With that said, for our customers and subscribers who use AT&T for their e-mail, we apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused. And to AT&T, I hope that we can clear this mess up as soon as possible!

Follow-up: Well, it would appear that we’ve got some resolution here, and that whatever blocking issues we had during the newsletter send-out have been cleared up. Just to be on the safe side, though, we have made some modifications to our e-mail list software so hopefully, we don’t run into this issue again.

Sometimes, taking a step back is the best thing you can do. And one of the things that we have come across while stepping back is the idea of simplicity.

When talking about simplicity, we thought about some of the services we offered. Then, we openly wondered, “Have we ever done this for anyone?” Some of these services as ones that have been offered by TOG Solutions since its inception in 2003.

Slow burns, to be sure. But is anyone really interested in them?

Well, it would appear not. So, as a result, we will spend a couple of weeks evaluating each of our services, both in an attempt to keep things simple for you, the customer, and a way to concentrate on the type of business we think will help us grow.

So, where did this all come from? From a few sources, actually. Since we’ve stepped up our activity on the blog, I have found that most of our current business comes from an area that we don’t mention at all: Transcription. Mind you, we have been able to establish a great deal of rapport with past and current customers, and we will keep doing so.

As for all of our other services, our review has been inspired by another source. Recently, we came across an excellent piece by Kirk Bannerman about the gradual growth of home-based businesses, which, of course, we proudly are. In the piece, Bannerman touches on diversification and its pitfalls.

This, again, is us all over.

So, with that, please excuse our dust for the next few weeks. We will be changing around some things, revising some services, dropping others. Some of our core services, resume writing, transcription and virtual assistance, will, of course remain. In the end, we will still be there to lend a helping hand when you need it.

Over the course of the past two weeks, we have been undergoing several changes to the TOG Solutions Web site, thie first of which being the merging of our blog and pages. Most visitors to the site and the blog would likely not have noticed too many differences from before and after.

After careful consideration, we also determined that it would be a good idea to expand our audience to cater to the mobile browsers, which, as you probably know, has exploded in populatity over the years with the introduction of the iPhone and growing power of other smart phones such as the Blackberry.

So, with that, we have officially ventured into that realm, and now, thanks to our recent transition to WordPress, the TOG Solutions site can now be viewed from all mobile devices!

If you haven’t already, feel free to visit the TOG Solutions home page with your mobile device. You’ll find all of our services, plus all of our blog posts in a format that is both easy to read and easy to navigate.

As always, we are looking for feedback from you. If you have any suggestions to how we can make either the main pages or the mobile pages more user-friendly, please feel free to contact us!

Even since we started make more use of our blog, I have noticed a couple of things. The good news is that the blog postings have garnered some attention. The bad news is that the TOG Solutions Web site still languishes for attention. When we first started the blog, we had originally hoped it would attracted users to find out more about us.

No such luck. But not to worry. Every challenge has a solution.

There have been numerous places stating that more and more organizations are utilizing standalone blogs instead of the traditional Web sites to generate interest in their services.

The logic behind it makes sense, and so, we’ve decided, why not give it a shot?

Building around the WordPress platform we had already established for the blog, we migrated our service pages into the format. One of the benefits we’ve already found by making this switch is that, as opposed to our original site in which we use HTML to build the pages, there’s not much of a chance of making a mistake and ruining the entire page.

From another standpoint, you’ll find that we have updated out Contact Us form to include some extra measures to weed out spammers, a long-standing problem for us.

The plan is to take this format and transfer it over to the main site directory in the next couple of weeks. Until then, you are still able to view the blog and the TOG Solutions site for more information about what we have to offer.

A couple of weeks ago, in response to the sudden closing of all of InkStop’s locations, we offered to their former employees our resume services for $35, up to 66 percent off our regular prices, as well as one free cover letter, a savings of $25.

However, after careful consideration, we felt that the InkStop employee situation is far from isolated, and that there are many others out there that share in their plight.

So, with that said, TOG Solutions has extended its offer to any worker who has recently found themselves unemployed in these tough economic times.

Again, that’s $35 for regular resume services and one free cover letter. And, unlike many of our competitors, there are no up-front fees! Only when we’ve finished the job to your satisfaction will you be billed for any services.

Plus, as we said two weeks ago, we understand that you may not be able to pay us now. That’s OK. We can work with you to defer payment until later on when your financial picture has brightened a little more.

For more information about what we have to offer, please contact TOG Solutions by phone at 216.245.0840 or 312.725.4864, by e-mail at info@togsolutions.com or by visiting togsolutions.com.

Normally, we take the weekend off to work on current projects or come up with new material for the Web site and the blog. However, recent news has prompted us to offer some help.

On Friday, October 2, employees at InkStop, a company based in Northeast Ohio, were told that all 152 retail stores would be shut down. To make matters worse, they were also told that they wouldn’t be paid for the last two weeks they worked, and would have to find their own health insurance, which was cut off at the end of August, unbeknownst to them.

For those who find themselves put out and decimated by this news, we at TOG Solutions feel your pain. That’s why we want to make you the following offer:

Any InkStop employee who needs a resume, revised or from scratch, you can get one for only $35. That’s up to 66 percent off of our normal resume price. Furthermore, we’re offering cover letters, normally $25, for ABSOLUTELY FREE!

This offer is good for InkStop employees around the country throughout the month of October, and even if your can’t afford $35 for a resume at this point, we can defer payment until a later date. We know times are tough, and we want to help you out in any way possible!

For more information, please visit our Resume Writing page, or contact us via the Web, by e-mail at info@togsolutions.com or by calling 216.245.0840 or at 312.725.4864.

When we first started TOG Solutions in 2003, we originally had hoped to build our business in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. In recent years, we’ve come to realize that our services can benefit people all over the country and have successfully provided help to those as far south as Miami and as far west as California.

And so, we are now in the position to expand our operations in the Midwest. With that, I am proud to announce that TOG Solutions now offers local service in Chicago.

Why Chicago, you ask? Because it is the third-largest city in the U.S., as well as the third-largest metropolitan area, we saw a great deal of opportunity to grow TOG Solutions. Plus, with personal ties to the area, we believe that it allows us to connect with our Chicagoland customers even more.

For those in Chicagoland who are interested in learning more about TOG Solutions and what we can do for you, please feel free to contact us at our new local number, 312.725.4864. We look forward to hearing from you!

Call it the preference test. Call it the blind taste test. Or even call it what many in Internet marketing call it today: A/B testing. Whatever the term, it’s one of the oldest ways in which organizations determine what their customers prefer.

The concept is simple: You put two or more variations of a product in front of a customer, and they decide which one they like better. For Web sites, the concept is similar: Present two versions of the same page to users and determine which layout is more effective (i.e. better user experience, lower bounce rate, higher conversion rate, etc.)

So, for the first time since the TOG Solutions site went up, we’re adding this to our ongoing effort to improve our site to allow you to better understand our services and how we can best benefit you either as an individual or as an organization.

Ideally, this new project will help everyone; you, the customer, will have a better overall experience and will be interested in working with us.

At the very least, it’ll be just one more Internet marketing concept we’ve learned, and perhaps can use it in the future.

That, of course, makes it a win-win either way.

If you wish to see what we’re trying to do, please visit both our current site:

http://www.togsolutions.com/index.html

And our updated site:

http://www.togsolutions.com/index-2.php

It’s always a good way to start out the month by getting something published in one form or another.

As a member of the National Career Development Association, I receive all of the organization’s reading material, including its quarterly journal and the monthly e-zine, Career Convergence. A couple of months ago, I approached the editors of Career Convergence with an idea for an article for a future edition.

I’m thankful to report that idea has become a reality. In the March issue of Career Convergence, I have contributed the article titled, “The Emergence of Creating and Online Presence.” In it, I have detailed how career development professionals such as myself should work with our clients to better position themselves in the job search.

One of the key points of this article is stressing the importance of building an online presence to job seekers. In recent months, this has been the cornerstone of our Super-size Your Resume efforts, which combine the traditional resume services with the power of online marketing.

I look forward to getting feedback from this article, since, like many of you, I am always looking to improve what we have to offer.

This post serves a couple of purposes. First, and most importantly, if you are trying to build your business, you always want to see what people, be it customers, competitors, etc., are saying about you on the Internet. You don’t want to act blind-side if you’re checking your company on Google one day and end up finding some disgruntled person posting things about you on Rip-Off Report or a similar site.

Secondly, this post is about having as much information about your company as possible. Only putting up part of the story can lead to the sort of conclusions that other people can make…

…just like this one…

While searching TOG Solutions and togsolutions.com, I came across this an iPaper titled, “Types of Resume Writing Service Providers — Choose Carefully” by professional resume writer Jennifer Anthony. The 6-page document is a very well-written piece on how to choose resume writing service and what types of companies to avoid.

Ms. Anthony divided resume writing services into three categories: Professional Resume Writers, Resume Mills and Resume Typists, Typestters and Designers , with the latter two falling into the “Not Recommended” realm.

And guess where TOG Solutions fell? I’d like to say under Recommended, but sadly no.

The rationale? According to the piece, there were two reasons.

1. TOG Solutions provides desktop publishing, transcription and word processing, and added resume writing because people asked about it.
2. TOG Solutions will make your resume look pretty, but little else and won’t provide you a resume in an editable format.

Well, first first part is true, sort of. TOG Solutions did start out providing desktop publishing, but actually added both transcription and resume writing at the exact same time. And we did that not because of customer requests, but based on our experience in both area, mine in resume writing in particular.

And sure, we do try to make resumes look pretty, but we are also primarily concerned with the substance as well. I think both Ms. Anthony and I can completely agree on the fact that a fancy-looking resume will only get you so far and that the more detailed the substance, the better.

In a way, I blame myself for this happening. But, as they say, you live and you learn.

Update: Slot this one in the “All’s Well That Ends Well” file. After a brief conversation with Jennifer Anthony, she’s agreed to change out the page mentioning TOG Solutions. Again, I completely understood her point of view on writing that particular excerpt, and still do believe that it is a very good guide for people who are seeking a good resume writer!

Over the years, I’ve fielded countless phone calls about our services. Until the recent phone number changeover, I always answered with my name. And nine times out of 10, this response followed my greeting:

“Yes, is this Tog Solutions?”

OK, the confusion is totally understandable. We really don’t have an explanation of the reasoning behind the TOG Solutions name, nor have we mentioned that TOG is the acronym T.O.G., instead of Tog.

At least until now.

The T.O.G. in TOG Solutions is Teed Off Guy.

Yes, now you see why it’s abbreviated.

But, there’s a story behind that as well. The Teed Off in Teed Off is actually the sports column I wrote many years ago when a part of Cleveland State’s student newspaper, the Cauldron. And since there are about 100 different Bob McDonalds (including my father) and to cut down the confusion with other, more prominent companies with McDonald in the name (self-explanatory), I used the Teed Off Guy moniker, shortened it up to TOG, for the sake of the other people (if any) who would be working with me.

In the future, I’ll be more forthcoming with why I do what I do. It seems to make better business sense…

In the spirit of starting fresh, February 2, 2009 marks the day of a change to TOG Solutions…

First, the TOG Blog is born, replacing the Crossroads Career Transition Guide blog will no longer be in service. Now, we will also include news and information about TOG Solutions, along with related articles about topics that are relevant to all the services we have to offer.

And there’s more. For years, the TOG Solutions site has been relatively faceless. That all changes with the About Us page, with brief profiles of myself and Jessica. We feel that it’s important to know something about the people you’re working with, as opposed to looking at an arbritrary Web site that could have been done anywhere.

Finally, we’re offer something new and completely FREE to all visitors to TOG Solutions, The Statement, a monthly newsletters with featured articles, offers and other great information! All you need is a valid e-mail address, and you’re all set!

As always, thank you for visting TOG Solutions, and we hope that we can be of assistance!