We would like to thank both customers and readers for their support throughout 2012 and would like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2013. We hope to continue providing a fantastic service to our customers and hope that you will support our services for years to come.

Please write to us if you feel there is something we can improve as your comments are extremely important.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The men of Copybook stepped up to the challenge and for the month of November grew a moustache to help the great cause. Even our MD,  Andrew Fields attended business meetings donning a moustache to resemble the famous detective Poirot.

The Copybook team has estimated to have raised over £120 during the month of November.

Copybook would like to thank all the guys who took part, all the contributors to the cause, the poor partners who had to put up with a moustache for a month and a special thanks to Tom Wells for initiating the growth of hair on many faces at Copybook this year.

]]> http://www.copybook.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=189 0 http://www.copybook.com/blog/?p=176 http://www.copybook.com/blog/?p=176#comments Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:58:56 +0000 Andy Fields http://www.copybook.com/blog/?p=176

Welcome to all our new employees

These are really exciting times for Copybook.

I am pleased to announce the appointment of several individuals within our Exeter Head Office.

We have a new Sales Manager and several new sales staff. I am really excited by their positive attitudes, which has already overflowed into our established teams.

On behalf of everybody, I wish all the new people all the success in the world. We all look forward to working with you and hope you are with us for years to come. In particular, I would like to offer my personal congratulations to Lisa for beating over 50 other candidates to achieve the coveted position of Sales Manager.

It will be a pleasure to work with all the new people. Wishing you all the best!

Andy Fields, CEO – Copybook Group of Companies

Andy Fields, Managing Director & CEO

It gives me great pleasure to announce that we are undergoing an extensive recruitment and expansion program. At Copybook, we are proud of the fact that we have never made a loss and are always seeking ways to improve our service and dedication to our customers.

Currently we are seeking approximately 50 new staff to help streamline our service, to improve sales and our presence worldwide. Personally, I am delighted with the response we have had to our recruitment campaign and, in particular, the quality of the applicants seeking employment.

If you think you have what it takes to help drive our little company forward, I would be delighted to hear from you personally. We have a happy working environment and are happy to consider anyone for an opportunity. Feel free to contact myself or my Personal Assistant – Mrs Kay Lord.

We really look forward to hearing from you.

Our Copybook editorial and news teams have been expanding and as a result bringing you even more breaking headlines and developments. With our network of industry specific reporters spread across the globe gathering the latest leads from their region we make sure you never miss news or developments that could have an impact on your working life.

Easter Break

The Copybook team will be enjoying our hard earnt Easter break from Friday 6th of April until Tuesday 10th of April. The office will be shut between these dates however please feel free to get in touch with us and we will get back to you on our return.

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!

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.”

Why have you started using it?
We are currently using it on one platform to see what affect it has across the gamut of our services. Security is at the top of our list of deliverables when it comes to our platforms, and of course what better site to trial it on than a security orientated site.

No hardware, no software, just a simple re-route, we’ll keep you updated as to how this works out.

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.

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.

We will provide you with easily digestible content presented in a simple to use format. We also offer an RSS feed so that even if you are not in front of our sites, you can still be catching up on relevant press releases.

This is a free service offered to all of our customers and site users alike. Why not see it running live: Airport Press Releases or Military Press Releases and please let us know what you think.