Jason Van Sickel is the owner and founder of Black Olive Media, a company that specializes in advertising in all known media. He went to the Dallas Arts Magnet school and then the Art Institute of Dallas with a focus in fine art and photography. He lived in LA for a time, but returned to Dallas because he sees great potential here. Jason shared a lot of good business sense. He explained that in selling advertising you must convince your client that they will make more money than they invest in a good advertising campaign. An average gain of 1%-2% gain is considered good, and anything above 10% is phenomenal. If you produce measurable results for your client, you will likely have gained a repeat customer, which is a valuable commodity. Jason showed us a demo reel he uses when he first meets a potential client, showing what Black Olive Media can do for them. While showing us the reel, he explained the philosophy behind different parts of the reel that helps convince the potential client to do business with him. And no, he doesn’t actually eat black olives. The company logo is one of his earliest creations. He liked it so much that he chose it for his company logo.

Here are some of the philosophies Jason passed along:

• Say “yes” to all business. It’s good to be employed.
• Things you want a client to say about you:
• “outstanding personal & professional skills”
• “fantastic product that exceeded our expectations”
• Clients will come and go, often for reasons unrelated to you.
• Have regular meetings and updates with your client. Let them know what’s going on before they ask.
• To make the money you wish to make, you may have to change your philosophy and perspective about yourself and business.
• The only limits to how much money you make are the limits you impose upon yourself.

Contact Jason Van Sickle at Black Olive Media at 469.569.1857 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . Visit Black Olive Media at www.blackolivemedia.com.

Dana Weitz presented Mambo, an open source content management system. Content management systems (CMS) separate content from format, and allow easy sharing of content. Content is identified by sections and categories. Some basic features of Mambo are:

• User registration
• News including Latest news and Random news
• Users can submit news
• RSS Newsfeeds from other sources
• Search
• Custom menus
• Polls
• Wrappers – let you wrap existing pages within your mambo pages
• Content approval levels
• Multiple WYSIWYG text editors
• Template driven format that can be changed quickly to give your site a completely different look

Mambo software is available as a free download, and some hosting companies provide a self-installing package that will install Mambo on your site with just a few keystrokes. There is a large Mambo internet fan base, providing support forums, addons modules and components, code modifications, and other Mambo news. There are many free addons available, and a number of other features that can be purchased. Mambo is easy to install and is highly customizable. If you would like to build a website with shared content, this might be a good and inexpensive solution compared to the expensive portals that large corporations use. Once installed and configured, little or no html or coding experience is needed to maintain a Mambo site.

There was such a large interest in this software that Dana has agreed to come back in the Fall and do another demonstration of Mambo!

Dana Weitz is the Web Developer here at GUILD and we thank her for taking time out of her busy schedule to show us some of the things she’s discovered.
Contact Dana at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Once again, it was great to see everyone at the meeting. We hope to see all of you and more new faces at our next one!

Editors note:  Since this meeting Mambo developers split and went two separate ways.  The new product that came out of this is Joomla. This site is built with Joomla.