BDC Advertising: We’ve Moved

Agency Life…And The Beat Goes On!

At times it’s like working in a washing machine, agency business can pull you ten different directions at once.  We love the jumble, it’s what gets us up every day — no two days are the same.  The combination of cold calling, networking, online advertising and answering help wanted ads is working.  We’re getting a good push of opportunities headed our way and continue to land new projects.  As deep as we are in this economic downturn some of our clients are seeing our efforts pay dividends…it’s been pretty gratifying.  One company is seeing a strong upturn in activity as we’ve preached the benefits of customer retention programs and they’ve jumped aboard.  Another company is seeing a substantial increase in leads from their website as a result of an adwords program we’ve put in place.  Still, another one of our clients is outselling the competition “15 to 1” because of the long-term positioning we’ve developed that has made the difference between first and second in the category pretty vast.  We learned this week that BDC Advertising had been selected as the “agency of record” for the Oregon City Main Street project.  We’ll take that.  We also enjoyed a meeting with a prospective client that was pretty exciting.  Great dialogue, sharp client, dominate product…we’d spent several hours preparing for the meeting and we were glad we did.  It made for a good discussion where we brought some new ideas to the table and learned volumes about their efforts.  The discussion resulted in an opportunity — a very good opportunity that we’re excited to chase.

Old Town New Look

Downtown Oregon City unveiled designs for its official logo last week. Each logo highlights the historic character of downtown Oregon City while conveying a modern approach to economic, community and cultural development. The public is invited to vote on their favorite logo by sending an email with their favorite logo: A, B or C along with their name and phone number by sending an email to rsvp.downtown.oregoncity@gmail.com. The logo with the most votes will be further developed and then used as a branding tool by Main Street Oregon City, the organization tasked with leading the commercial, cultural and community development initiatives in downtown Oregon City. One entry will also be selected to have lunch with Lloyd Purdy, Oregon City’s new Downtown Manager. “It’s time to focus attention on downtown Oregon City,” said Lloyd Purdy, Downtown Manager for Main Street Oregon City. “We use a grass-roots approach to downtown develop. Selecting the logo and visual identity of downtown Oregon City should be an opportunity for area residents to get involved.” Main Street Oregon City will also unveil the three versions of the logo at various locations throughout downtown Oregon City. Downtown visitors are welcome to vote on their favorite design by dropping their business card into a collection can at Coffee Rush, 900 Main Street in downtown Oregon City or at Mi Famiglia, 701 Main Street, downtown Oregon City. Downtown Oregon City creative firm BDC advertising, 706 Main Street, developed about a dozen concept logos for Main Street Oregon City’s promotions committee to choose from. That group narrowed the field down to three and then decided to invite downtown visitors to vote for their favorite. “The integration of Downtown Oregon City’s rich history and scenic beauty portrayed in the logo combine to welcome people to our door step.” said Melodi Dugan partner of BDC Advertising, a creative firm in downtown Oregon City. “It is challenging to create a visual image that captures the true diversity of Downtown Oregon city, but we welcomed the opportunity.” While all of the logos build upon a unique characteristic or feature of downtown Oregon City, they each have a distinct context and feel. Downtown visitors are invite to vote for their favorite logo throughout the month of March. At the end of the month, Main Street Oregon City will select the final logo. “Each image shows a unique part of downtown Oregon City,” said Main Street Oregon City Promotions Committee co-chair Lynda Orzen. “It will be a very close contest and a true challenge for the community to pick a favorite.” Any logo vote submitted through rsvp.downtown.oregoncity@gmail.com before April 30th will be counted.

Snowballs In The Dead Of Summer

It’s starting to snowball…in one short (and frenetically fast) month we’ve lined up a litany of meetings, landed several nice opportunities and found business lurking in areas you only find by starting the journey we’ve been on.  One networking friend figured it out in radio through “stimulus dollars” that local governments were landing.  “They need to let people know what’s going on with the money they’re getting”, he started.  “Radio’s the perfect tool in this area…everyone listens to it and our station is the one that’s listened to most — it’s the perfect medium to let people know how and where the money’s being spent.”  This friend made his annual sales goal (their fiscal ends in July) by the end of February…he’s a hero in his company.  One of the radio stations here in town talked about how a contractor was close to under and in the 9th inning with two outs and only a breath of business life left found some “stimulus” business through GoOregon, a government inspired effort that’s dispersing projects. That opportunity saved the business.  That got us thinking as well as we began mining for suitable RFP’s.  We found several, but the operative word here, “suitable”, stymied some of our efforts.  Still, we’ve found a few that fit nicely and we’re chasing.   So now, the marketing of our advertising business consists of an online advertising program, networking, social networking, cold-calling, responding to help wanted ads with our “the marketing director you’ve always wanted” approach and RFP’s.   Business is as slow as you allow it to be.  It’s there, you have to look for it, find it, chase it, get it in a headlock and don’t let it go. It’s a different world today than it was a year or two ago.  It’s forced us to work harder, smarter, more efficiently and watch our bottom line and our client’s bottom line like a hawk.  Conversely, other business owners and managers are so gut shot they’re just numb. Afraid to do anything they’re just waiting and hoping this is just a bad dream they’re going to wake up from soon.  It’s not, it’s reality, pinch yourself…it hurts. Action creates action, doing nothing achieves nothing. As one business owner admitted, “I just don’t want to work that hard anymore.” Well?

Setup a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) on Windows Vista

Setting up a development sever can be the best way to build and test your websites. You’ll be surprised how quickly you will get through this short installation and configuration process and have a fully functional development/testing server on your own machine.

NOTE: This tutorial is for setting up a PHP development environment using Apache and doesn’t support ASP.NET development. Please refer to Microsoft for more information about ASP.NET and Windows IIS.

Step 1:
Download Apache 2.2.11 for Windows (http://apache.deathculture.net/httpd/binaries/win32/apache_2.2.11-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi)
Download PHP for Windows (http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.2.10-win32-installer.msi/from/us.php.net/mirror)
Download MySQL 5 for Windows (http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.36-win32.msi/from/http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mysql/)

Step 2:
We will be using Apache for the web server. Confirm that you do not have IIS (Internet Information Services) enabled in the Windows Features section of the “Add/Remove Programs” tool in the Control Panel.

Step 3:
Run the Apache .msi file you downloaded above. This will prompt you for:

* whether or not you want to run Apache for all users (installing Apache as a Service), or if you want it installed to run in a console window when you choose the Start Apache shortcut.
* your Server name, Domain name and administrative email account.
* the directory to install Apache into (the default is C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache although you can change this to any other directory you wish)
* the installation type. The “Complete” option installs everything, including the source code if you downloaded the -src.msi package. Choose the “Custom” install if you choose not to install the documentation, or the source code from that package.

During the installation, Apache will configure the files in the conf directory for your chosen installation directory. However if any of the files in this directory already exist they will not be overwritten. Instead the new copy of the corresponding file will be left with the extension .default.conf. So, for example, if conf\httpd.conf already exists it will not be altered, but the version which would have been installed will be left in conf\httpd.default.conf. After the installation has finished you should manually check to see what in new in the .default.conf file, and if necessary update your existing configuration files.

Also, if you already have a file called htdocs\index.html then it will not be overwritten (no index.html.default file will be installed either). This should mean it is safe to install Apache over an existing installation (but you will have to stop the existing server running before doing the installation, then start the new one after the installation is finished).

After installing Apache, you should edit the configuration files in the conf directory as required. These files will be configured during the install ready for Apache to be run from the directory where it was installed, with the documents served from the subdirectory htdocs. There are lots of other options which should be set before you start really using Apache. However to get started quickly the files should work as installed.

If you eventually uninstall Apache, your configuration and log files will not be removed. You will need to delete the installation directory tree (”C:\Program Files\Apache Group” by default) yourself if you do not care to keep your configuration and other web files. Since the httpd.conf file is your accumulated effort in using Apache, you need to take the effort to remove it. The same happens for all other files you may have created, as well as any log files Apache created.

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/windows.html for additional information on installation and customizing the configuration of Apache.

Step 4:
Run the MSI installer and follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard. You will be prompted to select the Web Server you wish to configure first, along with any configuration details needed.

You will then be prompted to select which features and extensions you wish to install and enable. By selecting “Will be installed on local hard drive” in the drop-down menu for each item you can trigger whether to install the feature or not. By selecting “Entire feature will be installed on local hard drive”, you will be able to install all sub-features of the included feature ( for example by selecting this options for the feature “PDO” you will install all PDO Drivers ).

Warning
It is not recommended to install all extensions by default, since many other them require dependencies from outside PHP in order to function properly. Instead, use the Installation Repair Mode that can be triggered thru the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel to enable or disable extensions and features after installation.

The installer then sets up PHP to be used in Windows and the php.ini file, and configures certain web servers to use PHP. The installer will currently configure IIS, Apache, Xitami, and Sambar Server; if you are using a different web server you’ll need to configure it manually.

Now at this point you should have a fully functioning Apache web server that is capable of serving HTML and PHP. If you intend to setup database driven applications using PHP/MySQL continue on with Step 5.

Step 5 (optional):
Install MySQL.

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/windows-installation.html for more information and additional documentation.