ABOUT KEVIN ULRICH

My name is Kevin Ulrich. Currently, I am the President and Director of Operations for Achilles Interactive, Inc., a professional web services and consulting firm. Previously, I was the head of Technology and Web Development at TM Advertising in Dallas, Texas. For years I had always wanted to run my own company, but first I needed to gain some experience. I started Achilles after spending close to a decade working with large corporations and gaining the experience I needed. This article is a little background on how I got started down my current career path.

I graduated from Texas A&M University in 1999 with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree specializing in Management of Information Systems. I have been building websites since my Junior year of college when I worked at the Center for Distance Learning Research at Texas A&M. I was employed as a webmaster, where I learned how to build websites in Classic ASP. Most of the work I did there was pretty basic, I would build syllabi for professors, and survey tools for their classes. I also taught a basic HTML class to High School teachers showing them how to use tools like MS FrontPage and Dreamweaver to build basic HTML pages for their schools.

After I graduated, I moved to Dallas and went to work doing web contract work for Aquent Partners. My first post college experience was mostly with ASP, HTML and a small amount of JSP. I worked at the VHA, IKON Office Solutions, Home Interiors and Gifts and Groceryworks.com. The VHA proved to be an experience of monotony, I built about 1,000 static HTML pages in about six weeks. IKON got a little more interesting, I helped them integrate a bar-code recognition system with a system they had built in MS Access. At Home Interiors and Gifts I mostly performed graphics work and fixed a lot of issues they had with their website after a consulting company turned over the site and didn't bother to test it on a server other than their own. The whole site was absolutely referenced to the consulting company's development site, so nothing worked very well. This was probably the highest distaste I got from .com companies in the 90s who really didn't know what they were doing.

Working for GroceryWorks.com was probably the best experience I got that first year out of college. The developers there showed me how you were supposed to write code and be organized and responsible for what you write. I also got a lot of my first Photoshop tricks and tactics from the graphics guy there. My favorite that I recall was Select Inverse(Shift-Ctrl-Alt-I) which he referred to as the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. I am not really sure why he did this with his left hand instead of his right, which if you try it right now, makes a whole more sense to do it right handed. Thanks David Kozak, if you ever randomaly come across this site. That was in 2000 and the dot com companies were failing left and right, I think I felt GroceryWorks bubble bursting my second week. I had worked for Nabisco as a Sales Representative in college and when I found out Safeway was going to fund their next round I knew this was going to bust, you see grocery stores want you in the store so you'll buy impulse items, in fact they make most of their money on those type of items. Thus it made sense to me that Safeway really didn't want GroceryWorks to work and seemed like the type of investor that was buying the company, so they could dissolve it. Advice to seasoned marketing folks from a person right of college was obviously ignored and they went ahead with taking the funding and giving up control. I lasted there another six months, before they had to get rid of all contract employees and it was time to move on.

The next jump in my career was off to Temerlin McClain, where I was originally contracted to be the programmer for Subaru.com. Before I even got the chance to work on Subaru.com, the company decided to have their site hosted internally, so I started to get worried about my job. I quickly got involved in all the interactive production done at TM, from banner ads, to e-mail campaigns, to websites in order to keep the contract going. At the time most of the interactive stuff built at Temerlin McClain were animated gifs and basic template e-mails. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, but I kept busy working on these things and learning more about advertising and marketing.

My third month there I got my first commercial website project. It was called Elite Status for American Airlines. The purpose of it was to build a tool that AAdvantage Gold members could invite four of their friends to upgrade to Gold and if they got all four members to sign up then the person who did the inviting would get upgraded to Platinum Status and received up to 10,000 bonus miles. I tell you what, some people will try anything to get free miles and this program had a ton of users for the two months it ran.

My next project I kind of took on myself in order to keep working. The interactive department was using a tool developed by a previous developer that was used to approve internally and externally the animated gifs that were being produced. It was called the Digital Approval Center. It had a lot of limitations to it and if TM was going to grow the interactive business, then it was going to need a better tool. It wasn't technically designed very well, the database wasn't normalized, and it had a lot of unorganized code that looked like had been auto-generated, so I started rebuilding it from scratch. I wanted to make sure the new application would have a normalized database, better code, more organization on the server, multiple users with various levels of access and abilities, and it would have the ability to upload many other types of files to it, e.g. flash, jump pages, HTML e-mails, video files and other files which can just be downloaded like word documents and PDFs. I worked on this for like six months in my spare time while continuing to build HTML e-mails, banner ads and jump pages.

Over the years at Temerlin McClain, I probably have built hundreds of HTML e-mails, flash ad units and jump pages. I have built around 30 commercial web sites, many of which have custom Content Management Systems, custom admin systems, reporting systems, or are integrated with some third-party CMS or product management system. I have also developed around 10 custom web applications. I can write HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, VB.NET, C#, JSP, XML, XSLT, SQL, ActionScript even AJAX, though I don't agree when people refer to it as a technology, as much as it is a technique for integrating other technologies that were already in existence, much like DHTML, but people love to use buzz words so I'll throw it in there so you know that I can write it.

Thanks to people like Zoe McDowell, John Rich and Derek Nelson, I now have a creative eye for how things should look and feel and have become quite particular about color theory, spacing, kerning and leading, which most people would never think someone coming from a developer's background would possess.

After a couple years at TM Advertising/TM Interactive (previously Temerlin McClain), I evolved into a team leader and manager. My boss, James Hering, allowed me to hire my own staff and have managerial control of my team and other aspects of the interactive business. I have evolved into an expert on things like ad tracking, SEO(Search Engine Optimization), information architecture, web site optimization for various server environments, estimating project time & costs, data modeling, usability, and oh yeah programming too.

Though no matter how good you think you are at something there is always something new you can learn from other people's experiences and knowledge, which every day my team learned new tactics, technologies, organization, planning, etc... the internet, training courses and most importantly, each other & our combined experience.

Now, my work is different once again. I spend more time on the phone and meeting with people in order to drum up business for my own company. Things are going very well and I look forward to everyday that I spend building Achilles Interactive, Inc. into one of the best interactive companies in Dallas, then the best in Texas, then the best in the Nation.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin Ulrich

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