Google Apps:

Google Apps, now known as Google Workspace, provides a suite of cloud-based productivity tools. Key features include:

Collaboration and Communication: Google Drive enables seamless document sharing and real-time collaboration, while Gmail offers reliable email services with extensive storage capabilities.

Productivity Tools: Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides provide cloud-based alternatives to Microsoft Office applications, allowing users to create, edit, and store documents online.

Integration: Google Apps integrates smoothly with other Google services, such as Google Calendar, Google Meet, and Google Chat, promoting efficient communication and scheduling.

Mobility: With a robust mobile app ecosystem, Google Apps enables users to access and work on files from any device with internet connectivity.

Microsoft 365:

Microsoft 365, formerly Office 365, is a comprehensive suite of productivity tools designed for businesses. Its notable features include:

Familiarity: Microsoft 365 offers a range of desktop applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which have been widely used by businesses for years.

Cloud Integration: While Microsoft’s suite has a strong desktop focus, it also provides cloud-based file storage and sharing through OneDrive. Users can access files from anywhere and collaborate in real-time.

Collaboration: Microsoft Teams serves as a hub for communication, video conferencing, and file sharing, enhancing collaboration within teams.

Customization and Scalability: Microsoft 365 allows businesses to tailor their plans and features based on their specific needs, making it a flexible solution for SMBs.

Zoho:

Zoho offers a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications designed specifically for businesses. Noteworthy features include:

Suite Integration: Zoho provides a suite of tightly integrated applications, including CRM, project management, invoicing, and collaboration tools, allowing businesses to manage multiple aspects within a single ecosystem.

Customization: Zoho’s suite is highly customizable, enabling businesses to adapt the applications to their unique workflows and requirements.

Affordability: Zoho offers competitive pricing plans, making it an attractive choice for SMBs with budget constraints.

Automation: Zoho includes automation features across various applications, reducing manual work and improving overall productivity.

Proton’s App Suite:

Proton’s App Suite is a secure and privacy-focused productivity suite, primarily known for its encrypted email services. Key features include:

Privacy and Security: Proton emphasizes user privacy, offering end-to-end encryption and advanced security measures to protect sensitive data.

Encrypted Communication: Proton Mail, their flagship product, provides encrypted email services, ensuring secure communication within and outside the organization.

Calendar and Drive: Proton’s App Suite also includes a calendar and drive, allowing users to manage their schedules and store files securely.

Focus on Privacy: While Proton’s suite is more limited in terms of applications compared to others, it offers enhanced privacy features that may be critical for businesses dealing with sensitive data. Find out more.

Conclusion

When selecting a productivity suite for small and medium businesses, various factors such as collaboration tools, integration options, customization, affordability, and privacy requirements need to be considered. Google Apps (Workspace) and Microsoft 365 provide feature-rich and widely adopted solutions, while Zoho offers a customizable suite at competitive prices. Proton’s App Suite stands out with its emphasis on privacy and security, making it an ideal choice for small businesses that prioritize the protection of sensitive data and want to differentiate themselves in the market. By understanding the unique needs and priorities of their business, SMBs can make an informed decision about the most suitable app suite that aligns with their goals and values.

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That’s the pitch from the Sun Exchange, the world’s first peer-to-peer solar leasing platform – and Waqa Studios’ means of funding renewable energy projects in emerging markets and offsetting our own carbon footprint.

Why do we want to offset carbon emissions?

Our work might not be particularly energy intensive, but clearly it does use some amount of energy to power the half a dozen computers and internet connections we use in the two geographic locations where we’re based. In both locations, a significant amount of that energy is renewable. It varies between 25% and 50% in both countries and we have little control over the market conditions that force our energy suppliers to change that mix. Then we have our development and production servers, which through intermediaries are ultimately provided by AWS or Google – again, we have no real control. Both has previous stated use of up to and beyond 50% renewable energy sources, but who knows what the true figure is?

Ultimately we have no way to calculate our carbon footprint with any accuracy, nor the resources to do so. We also have no control over the source of energy anyway. So what can we do?

We’re not going to be hanging solar panels out of our office windows and I’m not sure Apple make wind-up Macbooks, so we needed a way to outsource the offsetting of our own carbon emissions. With no real idea by how much we need to offset, it made sense to go with “as much as possible whenever we can“.

How does it work?

The Sun Exchange identifies schools, businesses and organizations in southern Africa that want to go solar. Their team works with them to build an implementation plan based on economic and technical viability, as well as social and environmental responsibility.

Once a project is approved, it is listed for investment to the public. That can be you as an individual with $20 to spare, or a large organization with many times that. Each project is open to everyone on a first come first served basis.

Each project also has a target number of solar cells to sell, and you can buy as many or a few as you like. Once all the cells are sold, engineers at Sun Exchange move quickly to get them installed and generating power. Your cells are displayed on your own dashboard across multiple projects, and key data is displayed, such as:

• the clean energy your solar cells generate (KWh)
• the amount of carbon you have offset (kg CO2)

But it can be so much more than a social good.

Typically, so great is the amount of renewable energy that is generated that much of it would go to waste – after all, the sun’s output is constant during the day, but human energy use isn’t. Built into the Sun Exchange model is an additional benefit… using that free and clean surplus energy to mine freedom money, Bitcoin.

Over a decade or so, eventually so much energy is generated that it surpasses your initial investment… and so that extra energy is converted to bitcoin and is divided over each month and paid back to you. In the end, not only do you offset carbon and fund renewable energy projects, but you’re doing so for free. The Bitcoin that is mined and returned to you monthly can then be spent as you see fit, or plowed back into the next project to compound your contribution!

As you can see, we’re only just getting started. But the plan of “as much as possible whenever we can” is well underway. With 211,000 sats ($120 USD) waiting to go into the next project, we’re looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in 2022!

You can find out more about the Sun Exchange here. Or you can ask me for more information!

The post Why we’re funding solar energy projects (on a small scale) appeared first on Waqa Studios.

Why the discovery process is important.

When we start a project with you, we’ll always begin with the Discovery phase. This period of investigation sees us learn about your organization, your business model, who your direct and indirect competitors are and how the market you operate in works today and might work differently in the future. Only in understanding your business can we build with you a set of objectives and then deliver a strategy that achieves them.

What building a website strategy looks like.

The second phase of our process for building your website is to define a strategy to complement what we’ve learned in Discovery. A lot goes into this, but in purely practical terms:

• We identify audience types, what they’ll be looking for and what we want them to do.
• We create a website structure with components implementing key calls to action. This is called a wireframe, a skeletal layout that is free of branding and visual design elements. The idea is to document what goes where and for what purpose.
• With the page structures approved, we apply your branding – colors, fonts, images – over the top to create a high-fidelity design closely matching what will be implemented.

So, what does this mean for options?

If we’ve understood your business and the challenges it faces correctly, there should only really be one strategy to present you with in wireframe form. If there is more than one potential solution, there’s going to be the best one, and the second best one. We’re not going to want to sell you on the worst solution for your business.

With an approved wireframe, detailing the page components and layouts, we would next apply your existing or recently completed branding to this. This process is not just an attempt to make things ‘look pretty’, but colors need to be applied to calls to action and other important UI elements. Again, there could in some situations be multiple ways to do this, but there’s likely always going to be a best and a second best option.

But it’s not just about avoiding presenting clients with what we don’t recommend.

Getting bogged down in trying to dream up alternative less-than-perfect solutions just to hit arbitrary numbers of options isn’t the best use of our time and certainly not the best use of your money. It’s almost always going to be a better deal for everyone to just recommend the best idea straight off the bat.

If there are multiple choices presented for no reason other than ‘just because’ then this is costing money. There’s going to be an incentive to try to claw back some of that lost expense. To try and get something out of it. Some clients try to pick and mix elements from two different designs to create another ‘final’ design, incurring more delays and expense. Not only is this not the most efficient way out of an inefficient process, but there are serious quality concerns here. Mixing elements from something we recommend as the best choice, and something we don’t recommend as much… is only going to create a third best option.

You’ll find us quite convinced that we have the expertise to know what we’re going and what’s going to work. It’s why we were hired. If an alternate option was going to be the best one… that’s what we would have done first.

What doesn’t this mean?

It doesn’t mean in the slightest that there aren’t going to be any revisions at all! There are businesses, services and models that are difficult to completely grasp and despite out best efforts, our very first designs, be they wireframes or high-fidelity designs, might just be 90% of the way there. In such cases we’d go back and rework things multiple times until we get them just right. There’s no hard and fast number of revisions we might need, but that last 10% generally only means a few tweaks are needed.

Working with us is an experience in effectiveness, efficiency and quality.

The post Multiple website design options or revisions aren’t a good idea appeared first on Waqa Studios.

For the client

Let the agency into your most intimate processes and tell them your deepest secrets about what isn’t working and why. The earlier you do this, the more the agency can incorporate into their plan. The more detail you provide, however irrelevant you might think it to be, could be of help to an experienced agency better placed to make that judgement.

Prepare a conduit for transferring information from your side to their side as well as from them to any other stakeholders on your side. Waqa Studios will have one person responsible for communicating with a client and that person will be acting as project manager. The client should replicate this setup on their side, with a single point of contact. This is very important if the client’s organization is made up of more than one decision maker or input provider – this single person should facilitate communication between the agency and the other members of the client’s team.

For Waqa Studios

We’ll want to be provided with as much detail as possible about what your pain points are and what you want to achieve. We’ll do the same with intricate and often overwhelming details about what we recommend and why, how the project will be planned out and what will happen and when.

We don’t expect a client to be expert in the techniques we want to use, the creative process or things specific to our internal processes… but we do want you to have it documented what we’re doing and why. At the very least we find this helps clients formulate questions that they otherwise wouldn’t know how to ask. It also provides a foundation to build upon for future tasks and expansions.

The Process

Our processes have been developed alongside our growing experience over the course of more than a decade. 99% of the value we offer is rooted in our strategies, methods and ideas. We want you to get the best value for the time, energy and money invested in working with us. You should trust in our processes for the best results, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push back. Pushback is a key part of the process and is in fact expected and built-in.

Be straightforward. Critical, Up-front and detailed. Provide criticism and ask questions.

The post The perfect client-agency relationship appeared first on Waqa Studios.

What are the benefits of accepting Bitcoin?

Fraud Prevention

Businesses take all the risks when it comes to online transactions, while your payment processors and even your customers take none. Those who work with PayPal in particular are probably all too familiar with fraudulent chargebacks, but even ordinary credit card payments can suffer from this issue. With Bitcoin there is no intermediary or authority that can unilaterally decide to confiscate a payment you’ve already received. Transactions are irreversible and secure, with any necessary refunds you might need to make completely under your control. Cost and time savings from this can even be passed on to your customers!

Easy International Transfers

With Bitcoin there are no middlemen taking commissions for currency conversion or international wire transfers. It doesn’t matter whether the customer is in the same room or using a satellite uplink in the Amazon rainforest. Or whether the transferred amount is large or small. The same fee applies. There’s no multi-day wait time as there is the inefficient and morally questionable traditional banking system. Secure transactions can be confirmed in just minutes or hours, often at a fraction of the price.

Security by Default

One of the reasons payment processors charge such high fees is because they have to deal with all sorts of compliance. With Bitcoin’s cryptographic nature, the security of the network is built-in by default and where PCI compliance falls entirely on the seller, with Bitcoin each party is fully responsible for securing their own funds before and during the transaction, just like someone walking into a store with cash.

What are the risks or problems?

Tax concerns

Most tax authorities around the world are, as you’d expect, very far behind the times. Each territory has different rules and regulations, but the common thread is that Bitcoin is generally classed as an asset rather than a currency. This can have complex implications that you’d have to look into and that we can’t go into here. One way around these problems though is to convert Bitcoin into your local currency immediately on receipt and input that into your accountancy system, or use something like OpenNode to do this automatically.

Placing Burdens on your clients

For anyone willing to pay with Bitcoin, this probably isn’t a concern as they are likely to be more than sophisticated enough to handle the process. As more and more people become comfortable with the process, this will be less of a concern. But perhaps don’t force people to pay with crypto!

Valuations

If you’re able to avoid instant Bitcoin to local currency conversion and you’re able to hold on to the physical Bitcoin itself, one concern you might have is the famous wild swings in valuation. If you’re working in your native currency and have expenses in it, having your recent payment be worth 10% more or less a week later can be somewhat problematic. This will change as more people start using Bitcoin in some way, but currently it is an issue for small fish.

How can I get started with Bitcoin for business?

It makes sense to offer clients every payment method you can, particularly if there’s no or little cost to you doing so. More and more businesses around the world are implementing a Bitcoin strategy. 

One of the best resources I’ve found to guide you through the basic steps is this article from Cointelegraph.com. 

When you’re ready to implement Bitcoin payments into your online strategy, just drop us a quick message and we’ll be in touch.

The post Bitcoin for Business, accepting as payment and getting started appeared first on Waqa Studios.

Volkswagen Group

Audi and VW logos practice social distancing as part of a new campaign on social media.

Chiquita

Miss Chiquita is working from home and isn’t available for her regular appearance. Chiquita Brands International posted this version of their logo without Miss Chiquita saying, ‘I’m already home. Please do the same and protect yourself.’

TimeOut

Global lockdowns mean TimeOut becomes TimeIn. Both London and NYC magazine editions feature the new look. Acknowledging the sad reality that most businesses and events they’d normally feature are closed at this time, they say they will shift their focus to takeout and delivery services as well as online events and things to do at home.

Coca Cola

Coca Cola practices social distancing and adds a message typical of their feel-good slogans of the past.

McDonald’s

McDonald’s golden arches keep their distance. In some parts of the world McDonald’s has completely shut down its business, while in others they are currently only offering delivery services.

Whatever your own thoughts about this emerging trend, it’s fascinating to see well known brands modified in this way. Social distancing logos. Who’d have thought?

Keep safe and stay healthy!

The post Brands practicing social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic appeared first on Waqa Studios.

Personal Tastes vs Brand Needs

While this is more common in small and medium businesses where there’s a singular person with a controlling, dominating vision, it can sometimes happen with a committee too. Through self-reflection we will assign some of the blame to ourselves as a agency for not communicating well enough what we’re trying to achieve (and I’m going to explain in a moment), but sometimes a client isn’t as involved as we’d like them to be or isn’t able to wrap their heads around this particular concept. Your business’s branding is not a representation of your own personal tastes. Instead it’s a carefully crafted marketing tool designed to convince your ideal customer that you’re the one. It means, in all cases but the most extreme cases of a “personal brand”, we’re catering to them, not catering to you.

The way your business is presented to the world has to represent your business’s values, your offering, and your way of interacting with customers. The visual elements (the colors, the typography, the imagery) and the interactional elements (how you speak/write, the impression you give off) has to appeal to your customer’s tastes, not your own. Keep that in mind at every stage of the review process!

• See how we start our Process – asking Why not How
• Want to know more about the brand story?

• Tell us more about your project and we’ll tell you how we could help

The post Branding and Personal Tastes appeared first on Waqa Studios.

Some clients really go to great lengths to understand what it is that they’re asking for. Their reasoning is that by developing detailed requirements, these can be presented as a project brief or a RFP document to prospective agency vendors. Agencies would then be able to use this detail to estimate the resources that would be needed to execute the client’s plan, providing the client with a fixed price and timeline right away.

While we’d definitely want to encourage clients to think deeply about their products/services, about their target market and about their business needs, we’d be doing them a disservice if we just followed the solutions they assume would work best to the letter. Instead, we should develop the approach to take for them, using our experience, skills and knowledge that we’ve built up over many years. That is, after all, what we’re being paid for. It’s what we’re good at.

The Talk

It’s great that you’re clear on the problems you’re facing. Identifying pain-points is the first step towards formulating a plan to solve them. But there might be even more pain-points to uncover, perhaps deeper causes to the problems your facing – it might be fixing those that has the biggest impact. As we’re experts in the process of Discovery and as our methods have helped develop strategies for hundreds of our clients, we’d like to help with the investigation and form part of the discussion. It’s also quite possible that while you’re experts in what you do, your day-to-day involvement might blind you to some of the things an outside consultant with a different perspective might be able see more easily. Since forming a solid understanding of the challenges is so important to suggesting solutions, and since we’ll be responsible for implementing these solutions and measuring the results, it’s better for all for us to be involved in the Discovery process.

We don’t just find problems, we solve them. We’re also experts in the development of solutions to solve any number of challenges being faced, whether they are design or technology related. It’s great that you’ve already proposed potential solutions to some of the things you’ve found to be amiss, but we’d like make sure that these really are the best options we have open to us, and that they really do solve the issues we’ve uncovered with you in the Discovery phase. We’d like to leverage our experience, skills and knowledge to work through each of the potential approaches, to come up with ideas we might not have considered yet, or to suggest implementing something we’ve already tried and tested instead. During all of this, your detailed thoughts and feedback would still be very important.

When working with Waqa Studios, we’ll constantly be asking you “why?”, but the “how?”, that you can leave to us.

The post Why we’ll ask you why, not how. But why? appeared first on Waqa Studios.

So how can your business begin its journey towards a comprehensive brand identity? Waqa Studios have proven themselves to be expert partners, worthing with your business tirelessly until achieving a recognizable brand. 

With expertise in branding, web design, and web development, Waqa Studios are a comprehensive digital partner with in house professionals available to help!

But we know it can be hard to choose the right business partner amongst thousands of options, so why should you choose Waqa Studios? Well, take it from our clients! 

A recent client of ours has left us a review on Clutch, a B2B ratings and review firm. Our excellent client review has landed us a title as one of the top branding companies in Spain!

We have not only been recognized by Clutch. The Manifest has ranked us among the top branding companies in Spain as well.

We recently received a 5-star review on Clutch from a medical center based in Melbourne, Australia. Tasked with branding the startup, Waqa Studios created an appropriately professional identity and went on to develop a website design that helped directed interested patients to the clinic.

The general manager of the medical center gave us a 5 star review because of efficiency, communication, and proactive planning:

“We didn’t need to explain our challenges to them, as they identified our needs quickly and understood them right away.”

The medical center is one of our many satisfied clients from around the world- not just Australia.

We know our clients are experts in their field and deserve only the best results, so we are thrilled to see we are delivering just that!  

You can find our work on Visual Objects, a portfolio-sharing platform that has listed us among the best branding agencies.

How can Waqa Studios help you reach your brand’s goals? Contact us for more information!

The post Waqa Studios Turns Your Company into a Worldwide Brand appeared first on Waqa Studios.

We’re a species of storytellers. Since we learned to communicate around a campfire, our ancestors have always instantly paid attention to a narrative. If you have kids, you’ll recognise this natural ability too… if something is in story form, suddenly kids find it impossible to ignore. From cavemen to 21st parents, people have always understood the power of stories.

Taking advantage of a narrative in your branding comes as part and parcel of the branding process and its tangible deliverables like logos, colors, fonts, etc. Before we even begin looking at these, we first need to understand who you are, where you’ve come from, what you’re trying to solve, why and for whom. This will build out your values and purpose, which should then be infused throughout your business.

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