tip of the week

Hi all,

today we released a small membership account, called the “Starter” membership!

With this release we have added an additional, flexible membership option to projektwerk.

As a “Starter” you can use projektwerk for only 8€ a month, enabling a more extensive use compared with the “Basic” membership. The “Starter” membership probably suits you if you wish to proactively contact other users now and then and want to publish projects or profiles on a small scale.

Your benefits as a “Starter” user:

• Contact up to 3 project partners proactively each month – instead of having to wait for requests as a Basic member
• View complete project descriptions and profiles
• Receive detailed matching information on suitable project partners
• Bookmark interesting projects or profiles

More:

• Publish one profile or project at a time
• Receive daily updates for interesting new matches
• Refine your matches with location and relevance filters

We’ve built a great widget that has been released and is now available. We would like to take a moment and describe some of the features our widget has and how you might take advantage of it.

Do you offer employment services and solutions, human resource consulting or manage a database for recruitment and permanent placement?

As one of the leading online  project marketplaces in Germany, we’ve been connecting freelance professionals and innovative businesses on our specialized industry platforms since 1999. Benefit from co-branding with projektwerk.

The widget enables you to offer your website visitors a customized project marketplace with valuable, daily updated content. By utilizing the projektwerk widget, you can provide your website visitors with interesting, sector-specific freelance work on individual project basis and simultaneously provide access to the best database for excellent freelance professionals. The widget can easily be added to your website and is totally integrated into the look and feel of your corporate design. No updating or editing necessary – the information is pulled automatically and syndicated over to your site.

Have a look at the widget on two of our partner sites:

For more information please contact:

Daniela Chikato

Mail: d.chikato@projektwerk.de

Phone: 040-43 21 30-36

This tip of the week is aimed at the project providers because they need the period of publication for the deadline for applications:

The period of publication shows in which period you want your project to be public.

projektwerk has set a default of four weeks, always starting at the current date. This period is concurrent with the application period, that is to say the time that freelancers can send you their applications.

Therefore we kindly ask you to change this default if the application period differs from the default. This might save you a lot of time and effort, for example if the application period only lasts for two weeks, but a freelancer sends you an application after four weeks.

Of course you can also set a period of publication for a freelancer profile, but you don’t have to.
After this period, your project / profile is automatically saved as a draft in your account.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact our service-team.

The general projektwerk newsletter is sent out to all projektwerk members once a month. Additionally, you will receive a newsletter that is customized especially for your branch once a month. The projektwerk newsletter keeps you informed of the latest news from the freelancer world: Read everything about upcoming business events, tips for successfully working with projektwerk or recent trends.

Do you want to receive the projektwerk newsletter? Here is a short explanation on how to always be up to date:

For new members: Just register on one of the projektwerk branch platforms and activate the checkbox for the newsletter during registration.

For existing members: After the log in on your branch platform, you open the tab “Home” in your menu-board via mouseover. Afterwards, you click on settings à account settings. Activate the checkbox for the newsletter and save your changes.

Have fun reading!

The last projektwerk release makes it possible to choose your preferred language directly on every site of projektwerk. Before the release, the language was chosen by your browser settings and could not be changed that quickly and easily.

At the moment, you can choose between English and German. You will find the selection right on top of every projektwerk site. This is another important step in the course of the internationalisation of projektwerk.

Good luck and success with the acquisition of projects on projektwerk.

This week we present you another profile/project feature:

You will find this feature when creating a new profile or project. The first part of the sentence means that your profile or project will be visible on the public welcome page – a really eye-catching position:

The second part of the sentence means that your profile / project can be found by search engines like Google.

Here is a small example: Peter´s profile title is : “Java developer”. John D. enters “java developer” at google.com. In his result-list, John receives a direct link to Peter´s profile on projektwerk.

Please notice:

• Of course you can change this setting at any time.
• Your contact data are never visible for basic-members or non-members, including people who found you via google.
• If you do not place the checkmark, your profile / project will not appear on the „All profiles / all projects“-page in the public area of projektwerk.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

With the projektwerk release on August 23th, 2011 not only the social media features and the vCard download where implemented. Another new feature is the search function for your own profiles and projects. By creating the search function we specially thought of our project providers who post several projects every day and who often saved more than one hundred projects in their accounts. The desire for a feature like this is definitely comprehensible. The annoying, manual eye-searching is now finally over. Now you can easily enter a word and all of your projects or profiles will be scanned. In doing so, not only the titles where scanned but also the entered skills and the description text.

Please notice: The Search is only working in the logged area and only in your own entered projects or profiles. You can still not search in the unlogged are in “all projects” or “all profiles”. This means: If you want to use this function, you will have to be a registered member of projektwerk. Here is a link to sign up.

Why? An updated profile enormously increases your chances to get in contact with new project providers.

Imagine you are a project provider and that you are just taking a look into the matching results of your project on projektwerk.

There are two candidates who catch your interest because of their skills. On closer inspection of the favoured freelancer-profiles, you notice that one has just updated his profile yesterday, chose an appealing title for his profile, filled in different scaled skills, smiles friendly to you, and his current CV is attached.

The other one has lastly updated his profile on the 7^th of March 2008. The picture does not seem to be new, the title is a confusing T04-number, the skills are all scaled to the middle and the CV ended in 2007.

Of course, the project provider contacts the first candidate because it seems more likely to him that he has free capacities and is interested in new projects.

So: Do not trust in the daily matching mail only but log in to your account regularly to always keep your profile up to date.

If you would like to get some tips about the optimal profile or project, you are always welcome to contact us.

The RSS-feed is another feature, which projektwerk offers you to be informed about news fast and easily. There are RSS-Feeds for the following points:

1. new profiles and/or projects in general
2. new matches to your personal profile or project

You can use point one even before the registration because it is the simple displaying of all new profiles and/or projects of one branch platform. There are RSS-feeds on every welcome page of each branch.

As well as on the tabs “Profiles” and “Projects”. There you will find the symbol for the RSS-feed on top, right next to the URL.

The subscription of new matches (point 2) is of course just possible if you are a registered member of projektwerk and have created at least one project or profile.

You can subscribe to a RSS-feed directly in your browser in form of a dynamic bookmark. Another possibility is to use an external feed-reader. Here is a possibility to download one.

The use of RSS-feeds has the advantage that they will be updated in real-time. This is the most important difference to the daily matching-mail. The matching mail is generated only once a day. So you have better chances to be the first one knowing about new projects or new profiles.

PS: Get to know the RSS-feeds of our blogs too! Just scroll up and you will see the different opportunities on top of the site.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any more questions to the RSS-feeds.

You can use projektwerk in German or English. The language is automatically selected by your browser language. If your browser language is German, projektwerk is displayed in German. Have you chosen English or any other language, the website will be displayed in English.

Of course it depends on your browser how to choose a language. You will usually find the language setting via extras -> settings -> languages. Just choose your preferred language for the display of websites.