Copybook.com - driving business forward

The end of the year is rapidly approaching, and rather than do the Christmas meal, we thought it would be far more fun to grab a few of the team and go for a high-octane sprint around a go cart track.

After an excruciating practice session in the cold, most of the team had got to grips with the 200CC Karts and were zooming around barely 4 seconds over the lap record, not a bad start indeed.

Qualifying was a different matter entirely as people started jostling for position with little regard for track position or indeed common courtesy, competitive bunch! Several spin outs later and more than a few yellow flags for the poor souls who either span their cars out or decided that a wall was a better way of stopping the car and we were ready for a race.

20 Laps on madness ensued, with everyone putting the maximum effort in. We had a driver put out on a black flag for using the rear of another car as a braking zone, people tearing off the tracks in all directions, and the top 3 absolutely hammering each other to get the top spot on the podium. All told the top 3 positions ended up being:

1. Barry McIntyre (Fastest Lap: 26.923)
2. Kyle Campbell (Fastest Lap: 27.248)
3. Kay Lord (Fastest Lap: 27.450)

Less than a second separated the top three in terms of lap time. Honourable mention to our CEO Andrew Fields with a fastest lap time of 27.912 finishing in a respectable 4th.

Race finished, we did the traditional and headed off for a slap up meal and the chance to reminisce on another excellent year in the office. Here’s to 2012.

After the events of 9/11 we realised that it was futile to keep working with print, the second our magazines left the presses they were immediately old news. Back in 2001 we made the decision to move all of our content to the web, that was 10 years ago. We’ve been through many iterations since then.

We’ve seen tables based layouts come and go, we’ve seen the rise of newsfeeds and their profound effect on instant news delivery, the tight integration of javascript across practically everything, the huge up-tick in online video and it’s use as a promotion tool (and the consequential bandwidth drain), a huge surge in mobile use and a greater use of browser technology (thanks Apple) to name but a few. At times it’s been tough, integrating a new technology or in fact methodology is always an exercise in patience.

On top of iterating our technological underpinnings we have spent an extraordinary amount of time focusing on our design, as the web has shifted. So too has our focus, specifically on UIX (User Interface Experience) and we have worked hard to streamline our sites to make them as accessible as possible regardless of platform or browser. As a consequence, information is now stored and accessed logically as you would expect  - it still surprises us today as to how many sites fail to achieve this essential task.

We now have a platform we can be truly happy with. Our customers love it, we love it, constantly evolving and changing to make it a more effective means of communication for everyone’s benefit.

We have seen competition come and go; it’s a tough market out there and unless you are delivering results, it is unlikely that you will retain your customers. Over the last 10 years we have kept our customer retention rate above 90% which in this day and age of economic doom and gloom is a fact we are very proud of.

We are hugely  grateful to all of our customers and site users for making us the original one-stop-shop for buyers and suppliers around the globe and we will continue to innovate in this space and deliver the results you are accustomed to.

Here’s to another 10 years!

We like to try out new technology when we think it can benefit both us and our customers, so as of today we have deployed the wonderful CloudFlare to Security News. We are just trailing it at the moment to see how it runs along with our services and users, but so far everything looks great.

What is CloudFlare?
It’s an intermediate protection layer for your website. Quite simply, you re-route your primary DNS services to it and CloudFlare actively monitors all inbound traffic to your site for discrepancies (based on a selected security level). Known spammers / bots and other internet based attacks which may slow down site response times are ‘killed’ before they even make the HTTP request to the server.

From their site:
“We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.”

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We are pleased to announce that we are exhibiting at the 2011 DSEi. Covering 4 days, 25,170 attendees, 1280 exhibitors from across 98 countries, this year promises to be bigger than ever.

Come and meet the team behind Armed Forces International, discover what’s going on in the Military sector and how we can help you promote your company to the widest possible audience.

You can visit us at: STAND N4-300

We’ll have a film crew on site with us to interview as many of our customers as possible and get your take on current issues.
We will also be providing up to date information and advice on the best way to increase your ROI.

PR Newswire operates in every country on the planet. They connect with opinion leaders and influencing people on a global scale. PR Newswire deliver releases to the print and broadcast newsrooms, journalists, bloggers, financial portals, social media networks, websites, content syndicators and now they have chosen us to help deliver their content.

We are proud to announce that as of today we have teamed up with PR Newswire and are launching our new module – the Press Release area. Covering the world in a matter of minutes you can now quickly scan through the latest information regarding your specific industry sector online. It will always be constantly updated, always available and 100% relevant. This is the first of many such tie-ins with large market players in the news and content industries. Our aim is to be the most up-to-date, relevant destination for both buyers and sellers in their respective industries.

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Companies are constantly informing us that they are investing so much with trade shows and/or events for little or no return on their investment. An investment which often stretches into $100,000s of dollars each year.

We have addressed this issue through introducing a Virtual Trade Show for a minimal investment, to a much larger audience and for a full years representation. Our Virtual Trade Shows compliment our existing exhibitor listings and help attract yet more users to our sites. As you may already know, we keep extensive lists of all the industry events globally, for example our Military Event List is used on a weekly basis by thousands of people. However, not all of our customers can or want to advertise at a huge event and therefore our solutions is simple.

Enter the Virtual Trade Show – a unique spot where customers can get a little more exposure for their company and product/service. It is similar to a supplier listing but we display the data in a very unique way as it actually mimics being at an industry event with booths and halls and a simple click is all it takes to view your information to assist you being introduced to new business contacts. (Thankfully, we have not found a way to virtually walk yet).

We already have some great ideas about where to take this feature in the future, but for now it is doing a great job for our customers, check it out @ Airport Virtual Trade Show.

Finally, we have completed the release of our online recruitment sections to each of our platforms. These are industry specific, job boards and best of all, for a limited time we are allowing job to be added completely free of charge.

This is a great opportunity if you are looking to fill a position in your own company or if you are a recruitment company looking to promote vacancies for your clients. Why not give it a try? Its currently free to add jobs and free for applicants to apply!

Set up an account in less than a minute, enter the details of the position and sit back and relax. We’ll do all the hard work for you. Your applicants can read the detailed description and get in touch with you directly. Posting your jobs to our platforms ensures your positions are exposed to a highly targeted audience such as our site readership / members.

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Copybook would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy new year. We want to say a big thanks to all of the people that have supported us over the previous year. We have now completed the major updates to all our platforms and continue to grow in terms of readership and traffic.

We would like to also say thanks to our clients and hope they are enjoying the new platforms with our new features that are not found on most of our competitors websites.

The main offices will be shut here between the 24^th of December and will reopen on the 4^th of January 2011.

We would like to try and keep everyone up to date when we make a site change, we have a lot of users and customers and it would be a shame for some of these new features to slip under the radar. So here we go in no particular order:

Tenders
We had a slight problem figuring out how many tenders we had, so we altered a few of the scripts we use to calculate this data and now you should find the tender count accurate all the time.

Header Navigation
As great as the old header was, we felt that it was time to change it, make the information more readily available and easy to use (that is what header navigation is for after all), now we have all the major links to site content in one place.

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Copybook.com has been relaunched, we are super happy with what we have ended up with and after a great many hours of toiling away, swapping out a great deal of code and ultimately creating this blog, we think we’re ready to get this show on the road.

I hope that this will be the place to come to for all the latest news and developments on our platforms. We aim to keep this updated fairly regularly and to keep you in the loop as to the upcoming changes or indeed changes that have already been deployed to the platforms.

Think of this as an open platform of communication for us, our site visitors and platform users. So welcome to the new site, the new platforms and a new look Copybook.