Download it today from the iTunes store.

We are very excited to announce that our new app “Visit El Paso” is now available through our iTunes store. 

A little history about the app: As most of you already know new media, is displacing old media such as magazines and newspapers. Apparently, based on stats from the El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau, visitors are requesting less and less the Official Visitors Guide. So we teamed up with Piñata Publishing, the publishers of the Official El Paso Visitors Guide, to create this app.

The aim of the app is to help visitors find relevant and valuable information during their stay in El Paso. Piñata Publishing brought their experience on what visitors want, so we are pretty confident the information is valuable.

We will be rolling more features to the app, such as itineraries, in the coming weeks.

Poster for the El Paso Museum of History

We recently worked closely with the El Paso Museum of History to create a Poster for the event “A Night with Da Vinci”

Marketing consists of many, many things like branding, advertisement, publicity, website, word-of-mouth referrals, even your how you handle your customer service! All of them are important, but the most important thing is how they interact and complement each other to deliver your customer a unique and delightful experience.[This is the first of 3 articles highlighting the importance of marketing and advertisement in new businesses]

First of all, we hope that before you opened the doors of your new business you researched a little bit, and have a clear idea of who your ideal client is. If you have not done this already I urge you to go grab a piece of paper, turn off your computer and your phone and think about how is your ideal client, and why is that this ideal client will buy from you. (and how).

This is were you want to get, right?

I talk to new business owners very often. and I am always surprised by how, unless they started their business with a huge capital, new businesses owners think they cannot afford any kind of advertisement/marketing.  They think they should not  spend a lot of money in having a professional designer do their new business logo and website, or in things like getting a clear brand. This is a huge mistake. New businesses lack the steady stream of income that a customer base provides, also, unless they open in a great, but I mean great location, they will remain unknown to their target market unless they go out there and get the word out (a.k.a do some marketing). This is an essential task for any new business: to attract and maintain new customers until a sustainable customer base is obtained.

However, very often I hear things like “I just started, so I cannot advertise” or “I just opened my new business, money is scarce, so I cannot do any marketing, but when things get better I will.”

In my point of view this is complete madness! Yes, I understand that you have to be careful with cash and that a good accountant and book keeping will definitely help but imagine for a second that you have a leg injury that prevents you from walking unless you go to rehab. One day you wake up and think to yourself “I don’t go to rehab because I cannot walk, but once I can walk I will go to rehab.” Now, if you are lucky, you will let time pass and maybe your leg will get better so you could walk but if you are not, then you will stay in that position for a very, very long time, if not, ever.

Very often people will see advertisements and/or marketing as an expense rather than as an investment. They don’t see advertisement as a way of attracting new business, or they simply don’t want to take the risk of spending money and never see it back. Think about, yes money is scarce but if you spend $500 on a marketing campaign that will eventually bring $1,500 back, wouldn’t that be a worthy risk to take?

It is very important that if you decide to do some kind of advertisement you must try to find ways to measure the effectiveness of different marketing mediums, such as giving coupons or discounts for specific marketing campaigns, creating specific landing pages for the online ad with your local newspaper, and so on. This will help you identify which efforts are really paying out and which ones are not.

A voice of warning; there are some marketing campaigns and mediums that work, and others that do not work for your market. Very often you learn this by experience, by learning from your customers, by listening to them, what is that they like, where is that they learn about the things they need (your products/services). It may be worth it to spend a bit more, and get help from a professional who will do two things for you: Will work with you to understand your market better, and maximize the odds of your marketing campaign, and second, will do the work for you, so you can focus on other aspects of your business to continue growing your business.

Now don’t think that just because you published an ad on the newspaper or you bought the biggest banner on the highway that your phone will not stop ringing or people will flock your office/store. It is unlikely to be the case, but you will start to position your business and to have some presence. (We will talk more about this in the second part of this series. Stay tuned!)

We just got a new workstation in the office. After getting it out of the box we were happy to realize that it already comes with a much better configuration for php 5.3 than the old 5.2 of OS X Leopard. Leopard only came with a very few and basic configuration and libraries, that were only fit to new web designer. Apparently they noticed this at Apple and this new version comes with a much better library set.

In general we have more than once person developing a site. So we use mysql databases that are hosted in a server that anyone can access, that way when someone makes a change to the databases it is immediately propagated to all developers, since we use something similar to a “networked drive.”

However, MySQL is still not included, but the folks at mysql have created a dmg that allows you to easily install mysql into your computer. You just need to download it, double click, and follow the prompt. The problem is that php comes with a strange version of mysqli. We were all exited and ready to go when:

Warning: mysqli::mysqli() [mysqli.mysqli] OK packet 6 bytes shorter than expected in /path/to/file on line…

mysqlidev won't let you connect to remote servers

This happens because the mysqli API library that php is using is the one that comes by default, not the one from the mysql version we just installed. Shoots, we need to recompile, and since we are at it, we will also recomplile with the new version of jpeglib.

Now it makes sense just to grab the configure options shown by phpinfo, but for some reason it references some locations that do not exists for jpeglib and libpng. So we will need to compile those too. Also make sure to remove your dir path from pcre otherwise it will also trow you and error.

Okay, let’s do this. First we download our source for PHP, LibJPEG, LibPNG

Lets compile libjpeg first: Once you have uncompressed the source, just go into the directory and type in the following

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6
 
CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" ./configure --enable-shared

That should finish without problems, now go to your libpng folder and type the following

./configure --enable-shared

Again, it should finish without problems. Do the same for libPNG, and

Now, it would make sense to compile php now, but there are some know bugs in php when compiling on a mac so lets get those corrected first, before we continue.

Fist you will need to modify the file ext/gd/libgd/gd_png.c, so open it with your favorite text editor and look for the following string:



if (!png_check_sig (sig, 8)) { /* bad signature */

and replace it for this other line:



if (!png_sig_cmp (sig, 0, 8) == 0) { /* bad signature */

Now, using your favorite text editor go to the following file within your php source code ext/libiconv/libiconv.c
and look for



#ifdef HAVE_LIBICONV
#define iconv libiconv
#endif

and replace the libconv of the second line for just iconv

Okay, now we are ready to compile php, so go to the the root of your php source code and type in (copy & paste) the following

CGLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -Os -pipe -m64" ./configure '--prefix=/usr' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--disable-dependency-tracking' '--sysconfdir=/private/etc' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--enable-cli' '--with-config-file-path=/etc' '--with-libxml-dir=/usr' '--with-openssl=/usr' '--with-kerberos=/usr' '--with-zlib=/usr' '--enable-bcmath' '--with-bz2=/usr' '--enable-calendar' '--with-curl=/usr' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--with-gd' '--with-jpeg-dir=/user/local' '--with-png-dir=/usr/local' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--with-ldap=/usr' '--with-ldap-sasl=/usr' '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-mbregex' '--with-mysql=mysqlnd' '--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config' '--with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd' '--with-mysql-sock=/var/mysql/mysql.sock' '--with-iodbc=/usr' '--enable-shmop' '--with-snmp=/usr' '--enable-soap' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--with-xmlrpc' '--with-iconv-dir=/usr' '--with-xsl=/usr' '--with-pcre-regex'

Life is good

Now, go and grab yourself a cup of coffee, this is going to take a while. After that you should be able to connect to any remote mysql server that you have access to.

If you share your workstation with someone else, then it may be a good idea to secure your mysql installation.

Now, in order to make your .htaccess files to work, you need to change your apache user settings. For that you need to go to /etc/apache2/users/USERNAME.conf and make sure it reads something like this
Options Indexes -MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

You will also need to change the second AllowOverride that you find in your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Well, that should do it. So good luck and let us know if you run into any problem.

Comicmercial - Phrustrations

This fall we are trying to do more advertising in different publications. We have come up with an idea, and we are calling it phrustrations. Phrustrations is just a way for us to share some of the stories that we have heard from our customers over the years about what their situation was, and the frustrations they suffered while running their business regarding web design, graphic design, marketing, advertising, and other services we offer.

So we are taking those stories, adding some humor to it, and running them as what I would call a “comicmercial” . Our idea is to run at least 6 of them and see how their work. I am not saying this comicmercials are new, but they are certainly a different way to advertise, but as usual in marketing “different” often implies risk. The risks that I can see right off the bat are the following:

• People who are not interested in comics won’t even glance at your ad.
• Even with a strong/clear call to action, people may still confuse them with a regular comic strip.
• People may think you and your company are childish or foolish.

As I said is something we are trying to see if it works. If they don’t make the phone ring at least we hope we would have made some people smile.

You can pick up a copy of this week’s El Paso Inc and see it by yourself on the 5th page.

What do you think? Will they work?

L and J. The old place by the graveyard

If you are an El Pasoan you probably know about L & J Cafe. The restaurant by the graveyard. It is a must-visit place not just for tourist but for everybody. Great food, great ambience, what else do you need?

It was a pleasure working with them, and coming out with a design that would represent the fact that they are a “classic” in El Paso, and also that they are one of the oldest restaurants in Town.

Let us know what you think about the design, and don’t forget to visit L & J for a great mexican lunch.