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I love a good road trip (especially one that involves a Cracker Barrel breakfast), and yesterday Brent and I left Dallas at the crack of dawn to attend a lunch meeting of the Austin Chapter of Credit Unions. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be building the chapter’s website.

It was a particularly interesting meeting because Dick Ensweiler was the guest speaker, and his topic was the state of the credit union movement. If you’re not in the credit union industry, this would be the equivalent of Quincy Jones talking about the state of jazz production, and if you’re not into jazz it’s like your grandma talking about the state of warm apple pies.

If you’d like to read more about what Mr. Ensweiler discussed during the meeting, I’ve posted about it on Open Source CU.

During our visit to Madison this week, Matt and I had some quality time to talk “Trabian.” It was just like when he’d stop by to see me in Louisiana so we could chat about growing his company.

Each visit, by the time he’d leave town ideas were hatched that would make any VC firm lick their lips – ideas that gave Jenny and me a reason to move to Dallas and literally next door to him.

It’s rare for us to have those marathon multi-day brainstorming sessions anymore; it’s especially easy for me to lose focus on the big picture when the day piles so much in the inbox. But our time in the land of credit unions and cheese was just like old times – perfect for discussing/developing/dreaming up some big ideas.

After meeting with the most innovative thinkers in our industry, I’m rejuvenated. Heck, I’m even up way past my bedtime writing about it.

I won’t go into too many details just yet, but we’ve got some amazing projects in the pipeline. And they’re not just exciting in the “We’re launching another website” sort of way, either. Plus, Mark’s doing some crazy things with Rails, Brent’s busy building the brand, and Matt’s already getting some of those ideas of his ready for action.

Oh, yeah – thanks for all the advice about visiting The Great Dane – learned about it first on Morriss Partee’s blog.

Just wanted to take a minute to spread a little love out to all of our friends, clients, friends who are clients, and anyone else who might be dropping by to see what’s going on. We really appreciate all that you’ve done for us, and realize that without you we wouldn’t get to have jobs that we love.

So thanks for that.

Hope everyone has a good one. Remember to do something festive, like treating your loved one to a red, Valentinesy bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, or a very special night of Big Momma’s House 2.

If you’re among the teeming throng of fans who have kept up with us day-by-day (read: “Matt’s parents”), you’ve probably noticed some major changes happening over the past several months.

We have a new logo (see above)! We have a new website (see above, below, left, and right)! We’ve decided to actually talk to you (see site updates after January 30, 2006 )!

This is due to a process that the buzzword-friendly refer to as “branding,” which, as it turns out, is simply the act of telling you who-in-the-world we are, and what-in-the-world we do.

So quickly, without taglines (we’re still working on one), or any fancy, inflated nonsense, I’ll explain who we are. Let’s call it “branding” without all the pomp and circumstance…just a series of bold claims.

At Trabian, we feel strongly that we:

• Love what we do very much.
• Are a very small company with big fat plans.
• Desperately want to help improve your business.
• Feel you should use your voice to create customers by building strong emotional connections.
• Feel that we should do the same.
• Work ridiculous hours, because we are perfectionists.
• Can be pretty hilarious.
• Will not beat around the bush.
• Have a really, really smart CEO (he started the company)...
• ...seriously, he put together large, complicated puzzles upside-down at the age of two. He freaks the rest of us out.

So that hits the high points. As the rest of “us” comes together, in an easily digestible form, we’ll throw it up here for you.

If you have an opinion about what Trabian is all about, we really hope you’ll tell us. Your opinion is half of the spectrum, half the battle, and your perception matters a lot to us.

Use the comments form down below to tell us what’s on your mind.

This evening, during a routine (ok, I admit, obsessive-compulsive) check of our site stats, I noticed that somebody had found our site by searching for ‘Matt Dean’. When I ran the same search on Google, I was surprised to find a link to our site on the front page!

Now before you start thinking me vain, I’m not pointing this out to show how cool I am. “Cool” gave up on me a long time ago. I’m mentioning it because the last time I checked, the same search didn’t pull up anything related to me or Trabian, at least not on the first 20 or so pages of results.

In Naked Conversations, which I’m currently reading, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel describe one of the benefits of blogging—something geekily referred to as Google juice. Google ranks your site based on, among other things, the number of sites that link to yours, and blogs provide many opportunities for bloggers to link to each other.

We didn’t build our new site in a blog format to increase our search ranking, but I must admit that it’s a nice side-effect.

Now all we need to do is get in the top results for “credit union website company.”