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.

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.

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.

We have a job module attached to each of our platforms, full list can be found on our Online Platforms page.

For an example of how these features work please have a look at either Military Jobs or Airport Recruitment. Click through and visit on of the individual job pages to see exactly what information you can provide, currently we allow the following data to be added:

1. A large SEO Freindly Job Title
2. The Job Title
3. The Company with whom the employment resides
4. Company address and map of office location
5. Brief job description (Shown in the profile and on the Job search page)
6. Detailed description of the position which allows any data.
7. Salary arrangements (Can be hidden)
8. Contact information (Email / Phone Number)

We will also have our production team take a look at the finished posted job before we put it live on our sites to see if there is anything we can do to get it better results.

We here at Copybook will not be involved in the recruitment process nor receive any copy or info regarding the applicants. This is a self contained process. Add your data to the site and that’s it.

If you have any questions please get in contact with us here at Copybook and we will be more than willing to help.

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.

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.

Testimonials and Typical Enquiries
We have a lot of people using the site to order things but also a lot of customers with nice things to say about us, so we have added this data to the sites publicly, so that people can see how well our platforms are working for them. Just check the new headers for the links.

Articles
We have changed the way our system works and given our editors the ability to write what we call ‘Multiple Summaries’ for your articles. Meaning we can give every article we post an individual ‘wrap-up’ based on the category that it is in.

We have also added what we call the ‘Article Toolbar’, available at the bottom of every article it a quick list of functionality regarding the articles. The ability to contact a company, email it, print it or even share it socially. Why scroll to the top when you can have it right when you finish.

Additionally, when a site visitor is viewing a supplier article, we now show other articles from the same supplier making the sidebar content incredibly relevant.

Server Maintenance
Yes, we know, super boring, but it has to be done and after some script re-writting and bit of tweaking here and there to timings, we reckon we have the sites running about 10% faster overall in terms of page load times, not bad when you consider the sheer size of these platforms.

Newsletter Archives
If you visit any of the newsletter signup pages like the one on Airport Suppliers you will see you now have the ability to view an archive of all previous newsletters, get a taste of what we offer before you sign up.

Associations Page
We have now given all our site associations the opportunity to add a complete listing page with the same amount of data as our suppliers, hopefully providing you with far more information concerning associations around your sectors.

White-papers
Site suppliers have always had the ability to add PDF’s and white-papers, but now we have them all under one banner in the new White-papers section. Easy to search and categorised in an A-Z fashion. Hopefully this will enable you to find what you are looking for quickly and efficiently.

Twitter Feeds
We though long and hard about this one, but in the end we decided that every supplier on the sites will now have the abilty to add their own twitter feeds into their sidebar. We don’t always have the most up-to-date information (arebeit by a few days), so now you can rest assured that when you post something out into the twitterverse, it instantly appears on your profile too.

Image Galleries
We have changed the way we display the company information (the supplier who created the gallery), and made it easier to understand and more importantly easier to access.

Supplier Categories
Again, after much debate we have now added another way of searching our suppliers, you can now show a complete list of categories in an A-Z fashion. We know how helpful the catergory system is, but sometimes people just want to flick through a list alphabetically.

That’s about it for now, there are many many more changes coming in the coming months and as and when we get them deployed to the production servers, we’ll update you here.