My name is Tom Nguyen, the president of Mr. Technique. Long before providing web design services in St. Petersburg, I was a sales rep for Powerhouse Interactive, a small web design company in Atlanta. I wasn't that great of a sales person, but the owner kept me on anyway because of my work ethic.

While I was at Powerhouse Interactive, I wanted to know more about web design, so I started asking the company's website designer some questions. He gave me a few tips, but I wanted to learn more, so the company owner let me take home a copy of Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver.

I was pumped and wanted to start my own website, but I did not know what to name it. The name Mr. Technique suddenly came to mind. What's surprising is that the name had nothing to do with website design.

I came up with it through one of my favorite hobbies at the time, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu requires much more technique than strength. Fellow students of the art would joke around calling me technical while I was not.

How Mr. Technique Started

In the spring of 2002, I searched GoDaddy to see if mrtechnique.com was available and it was! I felt like I struck gold and purchased the name immediately. I set up Mr. Technique as a personal website. I knew how to code a little HTML, but I lacked any graphic design skills, so I bought Teach Yourself Visually Photoshop 2. I mowed through it in two days, and I was anxious to put my new found graphic design skills to work on my website.

Within a couple of months of setting up my website, I picked up my first two clients. I did this while I was living in New York City. I wasn't working for Powerhouse Interactive anymore, I was freelancing. I didn't know that much about designing websites back then, but I guess I knew enough to get paid a little for it.

I started imagining myself doing this on a full time basis, but I wasn't quite there yet. I didn't have the knowledge or more importantly, enough clients...yet. I started reading books and doing online tutorials to gather more knowledge about web design while I worked a few other jobs to support myself.

Every chance I got, I would immerse myself in a website design book to further my knowledge. My design skills got better, and I even learned a little bit of Flash and server-side programming languages like PHP, MySQL, and Perl to boot. I was getting clients through word of mouth. All of sudden, I found myself with enough work to keep me busy every day.

In 2007, Mr. Technique, Inc. was born.

Reaching the Top of Google

At the end of 2011, I started learning about SEO by reading industry websites and applying the learned principles to this website as well as my clients' websites. In 2011, if you had typed in the term atlanta web design in Google, Mr. Technique would not have been found in the first 10 pages. As I continued to learn about SEO, Mr. Technique's rankings improved reaching a peak in 2015 teetering between the top 2 results on Google for the keyword atlanta web design (read the recap of my SEO journey).

At the top of Google, I had more leads coming in than I could handle. I had to reject most inquiries that came in because I didn't want the quality of our work to suffer with our existing clients (see mission statement). The workload had become too much for one man to handle, so I slowly put together a small team (an assistant, a web developer, and a graphic designer).

As a result of having a small team, Mr. Technique won several Web Design and SEO awards.

Move to St. Petersburg

Tom Nguyen of Mr. Technique at the St. Petersburg Pier

As much as I enjoyed steady leads coming in because of Mr. Technique being at the top of Google for Atlanta web design and SEO related keywords, Atlanta wasn't a place where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. At the end of October 2020, my wife and I moved down to St. Petersburg, FL. We had planned this move for months, and I had already reserved an office for Mr. Technique in St. Petersburg.

Relocating a business isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Upon moving to St. Petersburg, I had to overcome a Google My Business suspension and lost Atlanta organic search engine rankings. Things are on the up-and-up now. Mr. Technique is a member of the St. Pete Chamber of Commerce, Keep St. Pete Local, and the West Florida BBB. We're slowly building our clientele in St. Pete. I still don't take on every lead that comes in (see mission statement).

I truly love living in St. Pete and what it has to offer. I bike around the downtown area a couple of times a week. It's such a warm and desirable city to live in. Some of our clients have even visited me in St. Pete while they were on vacation. I may not be a 'Burger yet, but I'll get there soon enough. I'm going to be here for a while if not for the rest of my life. My wife and I are enjoying the process of getting set up here.

If you haven't gathered this yet, I'm big on meeting clients in-person. I have met almost all of our clients in-person and that even includes the ones outside of Georgia and Florida. If you have read this whole page, let me know. I spent quite a bit of time writing it.

What Would You Like To Do Next?

Strange Facts About Me

Digtial Marketing Awards and Press Mentions

Mr. Technique has received multiple Web Design, SEO, and Digital Marketing awards over the years.

Click on any of the logos below to get more information.