Google+ Business Pages

There was a time when Facebook was the be-all and end-all of social networking. Since 7 November 2011, the balance has apparently shifted. Google+ moved up a gear with its Business Pages.

Twitter is one of our favourite tools for getting our message out on a regular basis, and you can always follows us here: @KesslerAssoc.

But now Google+ is offering a very useful method of communicating with clients and contacts, not least because Google+ is tied in with Google search. Let's face it, if you're searching for something these days, you're more likely to use Google than any other major search engine. While Facebook pages have been good, they don't index so well simply because they and Google are not the best of friends.

Google+ business pages could overshadow Facebook's version to a serious extent.

Pages can be created in five categories (Local Business or Place; Product or Brand; Company, Institution or Organisation; Arts, Entertainment or Sports; Other). This makes things easier for businesses, while helping users when they search for brands by categories.

With twenty times less users than on Facebook, the Google+ stream is less cluttered and give posts a longer shelf life.

Circles allow Pages to send messages to specific groups. The process is also faster than on Facebook.

That's not bad. So to test the water, Kessler Associates has created its own Google+ business page. It's still in its early stages, but why not visit us there, leave a comment or two, or have a chat. You can find us at Kessler Associates Google+ Page.

Case Study - Word Templates 1

To highlight how Word and PowerPoint template projects can be arranged for you, we've written a few case studies. These examine individual projects and the clients involved with them so that we can show what kind of background they have, what kind of templates they need, and how we complete the project.



The first of our case studies covers a Word document templates project that started as far back as 1999 and is still going strong today. The client is a housing association based in the south of England. We built them a set of advanced level 'wizard' templates, with complex programming and dialogue boxes that request the information to be placed into each new document, such as subject, recipient name and address, sign-off details, and even a choice of company logo and division.

Once all the information has been entered and the OK button is clicked, all that information is placed into its correct position on the page (whether it be a letter, fax, memo, or report). All the user has to do next is start typing the document's content. Much of the detail entered into the dialogue boxes can be saved and re-used, especially recipient addresses and sign-off names and job positions.

This approach makes document creation a very simple and straightforward process, and minimises the opportunity for users to make changes to the company's document layout. Any number of templates can be included in this automated approach, and older templates can also be bundled with them, with an option to run them from the custom Word toolbar that comes with the templates. The toolbar (shown in the image below) is where all the options covering the use of your templates are stored, just like any of the menus in Word. The user just clicks on a single option or button to create a new document or run any number of other options.



This first case study also shows you what happens after the completion of the first stages of the project. In this case, several updates and upgrades have been requested over the years, along with several new templates, as the association's requirements changed. Take a look for yourself and see how a set of professionally designed and constructed templates can help you.

Visit the case studies page and download the first two case studies in PDF format.

Whatever your needs, we have the solution.

Kessler Associates Portfolio

Over the past few months, Kessler Associates has regularly been publishing photos to an album on our Facebook page which displays the very best bits of our portfolio. You can see that album by visiting our Facebook page and viewing the photos section.

You can find the Kessler Associates Facebook page here: http://on.fb.me/f1BcUl

The portfolio picture album can be found here: http://on.fb.me/gBVo7z

If you click on the 'Like' button on the main page, you will be able to join the discussions, ask us any questions you may have, and comment on the portfolio itself.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Freelance Marketing Representative

Kessler Associates is seeking a marketing representative to help locate new clients. Work is paid on a commission-only basis, but you are free to pursue any avenues of enquiry and also follow up on old clients who have not been active for some time.

This would be ideal for marketing students who wish to gain some experience, but also for anyone who has some free time and who doesn't mind using the telephone. Full details and terms can be supplied to you upon request.

Please visit the contact page on the Kessler Associates web site and let us know that you are interested.

Online Networking

Business networking via the Internet has increased immensely in the past few years, but does it actually work?

It has become more and more acceptable to admit that business networking sites have a key role to play in supporting small and medium sized companies across the UK.

Many of these companies now have Facebook pages representing their businesses. They have a presence on LinkedIn, they tweet soundbites of their every move on their Twitter account, and smaller companies and sole traders can bid for jobs on sites such as PeoplePerHour.com, The Business Network Online, and a newer rival, OfficeCavalry.com. Business owners can now spend hours of their working day making new links, quoting online for projects, and posting portfolio photos and information to their business profiles. But what's it all for?

Since September 2010, Kessler Associates has been conducting an experiment in making contacts and bidding for work online and the results have been eye-opening. Or rather the lack of results.

We created a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kessler-Associates/61606971514

We registered a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/#!/KesslerAssoc

We opened a LinkedIn account at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/kesslerassociates

And we registered at PeoplePerHour and Office Cavalry and started bidding for projects.

Four months later, we have eighteen 'fans' on Facebook, we have tweeted 58 times, we have 97 LinkedIn connections, we have bid for twenty-two projects on PeoplePerHour.com and one on the brand new OfficeCavalry site.

That tidy sum has involved a great many hours of writing contact messages, trimming uplifting tweets to fit the strict word count required, calculating and wording hopeful bids, creating and uploading portfolio pictures and PDF-format portfolio files, writing profile content, editing profile content to improve it, and then editing it again because the earlier version didn't look right, and wading through pages and pages of material from other companies doing the same thing to see if we could offer them any services which they might find useful.

There’s no doubt that the opportunity to meet new customers and gain better and more competitive quotes from a wider supplier base is absolutely critical – and that’s where online business networking should come in - but there is clearly a danger of going too far with it.

Four months of work and the results were surprising. Not one single working project has been generated from any of the activities described above. In fact, the only newly-generated work in that time has come from direct email contact to businesses; a message sent to one individual in the hope that they like what you are saying and agree that there are grounds for working together.

The amount of time you can spend at networking online can be hugely disproportionate to the return, as we have clearly found. Ultimately, networking of this kind allows you to reach more people with less effort, to identify and connect with the right people more quickly, and to reduce travel time and expense. Just be careful that you are doing what is useful for your business, and not simply broadcasting to an audience that isn't listening. And that includes blog-writing too!

Kessler Associates Translations

We've been busy marketing the translations side of our work by adding Kessler Associates Translations to a few databases, online directories, and translation market sites.

You can now find us on ProZ.com, the translation workplace, where you can see our profile and a large number of the language combinations in which we can work.

Remember that if you need any of your documents translated, just drop us a line and we'll find the best translator to handle the project. We promise to get back to you as quickly as possible, and will work on your translations at a truly inhuman rate in order to complete them, although this won't compromise the quality of the work in any way. That's a promise.

Kessler Associates Printhouse

Something new from Kessler Associates is our Printhouse.

Although not something that was foreseen at the start of the year, it has turned out to be a natural extension of the translations services we have already been offering for some time.

With this new, and exciting, additional service, we can now meet your printing requirements for hardcover and softcover books, brochures, and other bound products, with one of the best quality and price ratios available.

UK printhouses typically offer printing and binding costs that are between 50% to 150% higher than ours.

We are able to match them for quality, offering all the services of a fully modernised printing company, but at a fraction of their costs.

Your completed book, printed and bound by us, will not only be a bestseller, it will be a cost-effective bestseller. Your company's bound annual report will deliver all the facts and figures without falling apart after ten minutes of use.



Don't believe the claims? Give us a try. You won't be sorry. Visit the Kessler Associates Printhouse web site and request a price quote today.

Using blogs in your web site

Blogs, or 'web logs', have become a major tool for internet users. Ideal for people with little or no technical background, their use can range from anything between a personal diary to a corporate discussion board. Due to their flexibility, bogs can also be used in imaginative ways.

Recently, Kessler Associates was asked to recreate a lost web site for Whitstable Town Junior Football Club in East Kent. One of the stipulations was that there should be some method by which the managers of each of the junior teams could report on games, add photos, football tables, and the latest news.

After a little head-scratching about how to achieve this with limited means, it was decided to incorporate blogs into the site. Each team would have its own blog which would be embedded into the web site design in such a way that anyone visiting the site wouldn't even know that they were reading a blog when they reached the team news.

To that end, a lot of the standard blog formatting was removed to leave a plain white page which still contained links to older posts, and allowed text and photos to be posted by administrators (the team managers), but did not show comments, sidebar links, or any of the embedded extras that are usually associated with blogs.



The final result can be seen on the Whitstable Town Junior Football Club's web site, which can be reached via the Kessler Associates web samples page.

Whatever your needs, we have the solution.

Flash Video Player

Delivering online video content through a Flash video player has rapidly become the most popular method of sharing video via the internet. You can see just how convenient it is by playing the sample video on our web site (a screenshot of the player is shown below for reference)



View sample Flash video player here.

Flash video files allow you to easily upload your video content so that visitors to your web site are quickly able to play it. As most browsers already have the Adobe Flash Player add-on installed, there is nothing standing between you and having great video content ready for your visitors to watch.

Kessler Associates can meet your Flash video requirements by offering you a range of options and features. We can also supply you with one of three levels of video or audio player to meet your needs. The basic version retains all the features shown on the sample page, but the playback area can be resized; minor customisation can include changes to the graphics including control panel buttons; major customisation involves any other alterations or new work to give you the video player you need to be able to deliver your Flash content online.

If you want something branded that matches your in-house style, and you don't want other propriety logos splashed all over your video content, then it makes sense to have something that is tailored to your exact needs. Why not contact us at Kessler Associates for more details and to discuss your requirements.

Whatever your needs, we have the solution.

Excel takes the Strain

Most businesses use Excel for creating their spreadsheets. It is a highly useful tool for calculating long trains of figures and providing you with detailed totals at the end.

However, there's a lot more to it than that. Given a properly laid-out workbook, small businesses and sole traders can run their entire accounts in Excel, construction firms can run highly detailed project fabric projections, and a vast array of facts and figures can be stored in such a way that makes the data easy to read and output to a printer.

Add to that some intelligent styling and layout direction, and you'll have an Excel workbook that can really do the job it is supposed to do, instead of losing your figures in something that's been hastily set-up and poorly planned.



Complex formulae can handle figures based on their condition so that, for instance, if Circumstances A are met (a cost raised on a Tuesday), a figure is added to Total X, whereas is Circumstances B are met (a cost raised on a Thursday), a figure is added to Total Y. VAT figures can be deducted from totals, or added to them, and can easily be amended from one location.

Programming functions can be added to your workbook to automate complex functions, insert new rows in a table, sort data, print it and even direct it to a printer tray of your choice. You could have a dialogue box that allows you to hide selected worksheets in your Excel workbook so that outside contractors only see what you want them to see - and what's more, they can only edit figures that you want them to edit. Summary sheets can handle your data entries in various ways, giving you a multilayered set of figures to work with for your projections or project calculations.

The possibilities are endless, so let us know what you need and we can show you how to do it. More detailed information is available via PDFs from the Excel spreadsheets page on the web site.

Whatever your needs, we have the solution.