Things were pretty hectic here at Fubra HQ last week, whilst Paul, Brendan and half the content team were away having a well earned skiing break in Val Thorens, France. The developers and network teams were hard at work putting together our new cloud hosting site HostOn.it, and as ever I was trying to calculate interesting things, such as "how much VAT do we owe this quarter?"

I was looking forward to having the whole team back in the office today - but it seemed the weather had other ideas.

Overnight, Fubra HQ, Aldershot and the surrounding areas were covered in a blanket of snow TEN inches thick! Some staff were unable to make it in, but the Directors need to set the example!

Here's Fubra's MD Brendan skiing - yes, skiing - into work!

I guess it must have been too tempting, having only got back from France late last night.

Even better, I was able to ski to the office too, which meant was able to ski yet avoid the extra luggage and insurance that easyJet piles on to air fares at the moment!

Of course, this being an internet firm, most of the team decided working from home on their laptops would be a good idea today - which left me with little to do but go and mess about in the park with everyone else!

Today, we're officially in a recession. This was caused by the nation getting in to too much debt and the government's solution to this problem is to get us in even more debt.

The government says that the cost of doing nothing is worse than than the cost of the bailouts to the banking industry, yet they are reluctant to make those costs transparent. We think the public have a right to know the truth about the sheer size and extent of these bail outs, and that there should be a debate on the merit of pursuing them.

Economics is often referred to as the dismal science, so we've tried to make it a bit more entertaining with our new Bail Out Brown site. The site aims to keep track of the nature and scale of the government's bail outs, whilst having a bit of fun along the way!

Niggle is the latest company to join the growing Fubra family, so we thought we'd take some time out to introduce ourselves. The business was co-founded by me, Helen Cammack, along with Paul Fisher, and aims to provide small businesses with a complete set of tools to enable them to collect and reward direct customer feedback.

Niggle offers online and off-line channels for customers to engage with businesses, such as public web pages, private surveys, SMS channels and freepost postcards. Everything is integrated in one online dashboard which analyses a business' incoming feedback and allows the business to respond directly and issue vouchers. Because Niggle is independent, the customer always stays anonymous and their private details remain secure. In addition to the technology, we also provide point-of-sale materials which businesses can display in their stores or premises to encourage feedback. Our basic online services are completely free, but it's backed up by a complete feedback package which is priced to make it (we think) a no-brainer for the small business which really cares what its customers think.

Why are we doing this? We believe passionately in customer feedback. Paul has run several of his own businesses previously, including restaurants, so knows how critical it is to stay in touch with customers. I have worked for companies with a reputation for poor customer service (eg NTL) and great service (eg Virgin) and I know which I preferred!

We are extremely excited to be working with the Fubra team. We tied up a deal in time for the New Year which means Fubra takes an active interest in our company, in return for not only financial support but also a whole heap of additional resources (PR, hosting, marketing, and mentoring). Both Brendan and Paul at Fubra share an instinctive understanding of how to operate businesses online, and that, combined with their super-quick, no-nonsense style of working make them the perfect partners for Niggle. The ideas and the decisions come quick and fast at Fubra, so we have a lot of work to do over the coming months!

2009 is the year for feedback. The companies that survive these hard times and remain on our high streets will be those that listen to their customers and adapt quickly and confidently. Larger companies have already started engaging with their customers much more closely. Where they have led, smaller businesses will follow, and we'll be there with the best product to serve that market. Do sign up for free if you're a business owner, and even if you're not, tell us what you think via our website niggle.co.uk.

We love feedback!

That was the instruction from entrepreneur Alex Tew in his latest online venture SockandAwe.com - a highly addictive game which allows you to thow virtual shoes at Mr Bush just like the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at the US president. At the time of writing, more than 40 million shoes had been thown. Great success!

Since the game was launched on Monday we've been addicted to the satisfying 'thwack' of size 10's hitting Mr Bush's face at Fubra HQ, so much so that we bought the site! As of the end of a 24 hour eBay listing we are now the proud owners of SockandAwe.com.

It may seem like a strange addition to the Fubra portfolio on the face of it, but the figures dont lie:

Monday: 587 unique visitors
Tuesday: 417,397 unique visitors
Wednesday: 1,239,744 unique visitors
Thursday: 1,914,243 unique visitors
Friday: 1,140,394 unique visitors in the first 12 hours of today!

We have added a top scorer board and a made a few adjustments to the site but the concept is working so well because it's highly addictive we haven't wanted to change too much about the site.

Perhaps SockandAwe.com will fade away in a week or so or perhaps it will evolve into a cool site for flash games but whatever we do with the site we have all had great fun working on it.

The whole event has been pretty stressful too though as we were actually at our Christmas party when we found out we won the auction and a number of us came back and worked through the night to migrate the site and add more content and features.

Today I'm proud to announce the beta launch of a new online accounting software that we have invested in, called Clear Books.

Clear Books Limited has been formed as a 50/50 joint venture company between Fubra Limited and Tim Fouracre. Tim has been a friend of mine since we both studied our A-Levels together at Farnborough Sixth Form College from 1998 - 2000. He went to University to study maths while I was starting Fubra with Brendan. When he graduated in 2003, he came to work for us for a year before leaving to train to become an accountant with KPMG. He also ran a small business in his spare time building a network of websites including an accountants directory.

Once Tim had qualified as chartered accountant he decided it was time to go to work in the city as an investment banker, and a year later - we head hunted him as the perfect person to work with us on a new accounting system.

In June this year I got speaking to Tim about the lack of online accounting systems. We desperately wanted one for our own accounts, but the market seemed quite new and relatively under-developed. I had previously built a small invoicing system for my brothers' company, but it wasn't a double entry accounts system. Tim had been working on a basic double entry accounts system for his mum's dance school - but it didn't do invoicing. So we decided to merge the two ideas together and bring Tim on full time to work on it... and so Clear Books was born.

Tim is ideally suited to this project. An accountant, an entrepeneur and a programmer - all rolled in to one. And I'm delighted to say that he hasn't let us down. Just 4 months after he started full time on the project, we are now ready to launch Clear Books in beta mode.

I'm also delighted to say that we're offering a free accounts software for charities. It can be quite daunting for a new charity to work out all the forms they need to file with the Charities Commission. Clear Books makes this process significantly easier!

It has been quite a few months down here at TalkOn.it HQ. The sites are currently undergoing another re-design but we see this one as being the one that'll stay for the foreseeable future.

The reason for this blog is to celebrate our first day where we've broken the 5,000 unique visitors to the network and to let everyone into what exactly is going on with the sites.

Talk Football has long been the flagship site for the Sports Network and regularly attracts around 2,000 unique visitors per day. The site now hosts dynamic content in the form of blogs and of course the forums.

However it is not just Football that is carrying the network. Talk Boxing has been a long time favourite and has consistently been at #2 in the TalkOn.it charts. The #3 spot is a battle with Talk Cricket, Talk American Football, Talk Horse Racing and Talk Darts all fighting it out in a right royal rumble to be on the podium.

At the moment I'm working a lot on our Talk Skiing website. We are putting up resort reviews for all of Europe's major skiing venues. So if you are wondering where to go for skiing in Europe then we should hopefully have you covered.

We are hoping to create a community on these websites and of course to do this we need your help. If there are any sports that you are interested in then join us and help us make some excellent websites. We are always on the look out for forum members, moderators and bloggers. If you are interested in blogging for us then me know via the 'contact us' link on the websites.

On the forums we can now set up your avatars and profiles as well as join in with lively debates. Check out the Premiership Season thread or if you have an rule change that you'd like to see implemented in football then discuss it in our Rule Change thread.

It hasn't all been plain sailing though with the websites. Constant struggles to get the pages looking right has seen us making many changes but here we give you a bit of a snapshot of how the Football Headers have looked over the past year.

As you can tell – we have been tweaking the site for quite a while. In the near future we'll be redesigning the main TalkOn.it website. So keep checking out the sites as they develop and grow and if you are interested in joining any of them then we'll be glad to say hello!

Today we had the pleasure of swapping datacentre tours with Sun Microsystems. While we're not quite on the same scale as Sun we always aim to impress and asked Wayne Horkan, their UK CTO, to perform our weekly generator test.

That means cutting off all mains power to the UPS suite and waiting for the black smoke and roar of our generator kicking in! Yes it worked, and there is nothing like throwing a datacentre kill switch to put a grin on any IT professional's face...

Oh yes, and we talked cloud computing and demonstrated our innovative Cloud Networking architecture too. All in all an excellent day's work in Fubra World.

We've recently slashed the price of our domain names and services on Livetodot.com, making us the cheapest UK domain name provider.

All .co.uk domains have been slashed by 75% to just £2.58, and customers can now pick up .com addresses for just £4.99, down from £14.99.

We're now up to 30% cheaper than our nearest competitor, and no other providers' prices are as low for single domain name purchases.

* All prices given are per annum

Domain	Livetodot	123-reg	UKreg	Heart Internet
.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info	£4.99 *	£8.99 *	£8.89 *	£7.99 *
.co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk	£2.58 *	£2.79 *	£2.95 *	£2.59 *
.it	£12.99 *	-	-	-

Livetodot was one of the first areas of the business that Fubra built up, and its growth help to catapult the company to its position today. Livetodot started as a specialist site, selling .it domains, but grew to sell the variety of extensions the site currently offers.

Over the years we listened to feedback from our customers, which has helped us to develop a great, easy-to-use online registration system, and encouraged us to improve the support available to our customers. However, we've come to realise that with domain names, the most important thing to our customers is the price.

A number of companies have put their domain prices up recently, perhaps as a result of the current economic climate, but we feel there's no justifiable reason for raising prices. We decided that actually, there was room to drop prices even further, and hope to gain some new customers as a result.

We would especially like to gain new customers so that when we launch our hosting service, HostOn.it, we can tell our existing customers about our exciting new service.

The response has been positive so far, and we'll see how many extra customers the new strategy brings over the coming weeks.

After much planning and hard work, we are pleased to announce that the new and improved version of Fubra's Airport Guides network is live!

The 23 individual websites, each dedicated to being the definitive resource for one UK airport, have a host of new features, updated content and a great user-friendly redesign. We've also done lots of work behind the scenes to ensure the sites are super fast, search engine friendly and appropriately commercialised.

You can see the results live on our flagship guide www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk.

The original guides were launched in 2003 to provide travellers with a one stop place to find out everything about UK airports. We noticed that there was an online airport information void, because the official airports either had very basic websites, or no website at all.

The guides were a great success, rising to the top of Google results and generating revenue through adverts and links to our other travel related sites Airport Parking Shop, Airport Hotel Shop and Car Hire Centre.

5 years on, we decided it was time to give the network a revamp. We've focused on ways to make the site easier and quicker to use, making sure the content is informative and up to date, and better ways to commercialise the sites without compromising our visitor's experience.

New design

The new design, as shown here on www.liverpool-airport-guide.co.uk, is in keeping with the friendly, bright layout of the rest of the Guides Network and the new header makes each site instantly recognisable as part of the Airport Guides network. You can clearly see all the content in the left hand menu, and the main sections are highlighted by the clean-looking navigation bar at the top. Each page has either images or graphics to liven up the text

New features

Live arrivals and departures

We have partnered with flightstats.com so you can now view live flight departures and arrivals on all the Airport Guides, as shown on www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/flight-arrivals.html.

You can simply click 'Go' to view all flights arriving or departing in the next 2 hours, or search by flight number, to find out everything your flight, including details of delays and cancellations.

Maps

We've created detailed maps of each airport so you can see exactly where to go when you get to the airport. You can also see at a glance where each airport’s facilities are.

All the airports have terminal floor plans, and the airports with more than one terminal, like www.manchester-airport-guide.co.uk have a snazzy Flash map too.

Shopping and restaurant directory

We've compiled a comprehensive guide to all the shops in each airport. You can find out exactly which stores are in each airport, where they're located and find out contact details and opening times for them.

Search box

We now have a search box in the top left hand corner of every site, which you can see here on www.newcastle-airport-guide.co.uk

This search, powered by Google, allows users to get straight to the content they need and displays it in a familiar format. It also displays adverts on the results page by using the search term to generate relevant ads.

Taxi directory

We've created a page with listings for taxi companies, so users can find the information to book their airport taxis on the Airport Guides. Eventually these will all be paid for listings. We're now starting to get in touch with taxi companies – the response has been extremely positive so far. This page is for www.gatwick-airport-guide.co.uk, but you can see similar listings for all 23 UK airports.

Better commercialisation

External adverts

We've really thought about how to include carefully considered adverts which don't detract from each site's information. We've partnered with Google AdSense to deliver adverts which are relevant to the content of each page

We've also introduced 2 different styles of advert – a long 728 by 90 pixel 'leaderboard' and a 300 by 250 pixel 'Mid Page Unit' (MPU). This gives us greater flexibility as to where to put adverts, and allows us to place them where they don't intrude on content - but are also prominently displayed to maximise clicks.

Cross promotion

Fubra also owns Airport Parking Shop, Airport Hotel Shop and Car Hire Centre, and the Airport Guides network is a perfect way of cross promoting our own sites. We've made each of our travel sites a feature on the relevant page, and placed the link to the site within the content.

We've also included bright image links to the sites beside the content to encourage people to click through.

What next?

A lot of hard work and careful thought has gone into improving the Airport Guides – but we're not finished yet. Our next steps will be to continue to fact check and improve the content on each site, alongside strengthening affiliate links.

It's early days, but the figures after the first day of the new design are pretty encouraging. The revenue has doubled, and we've seen an increase in visitors too. We expect the traffic to continue to rise as users start to find our new content through search engines.

Take a look at the new look guides, and let us know what you think.

Hi Everyone, My name is Matt Godwin and I am one of the website developers for Fubra. I have been working here for over two years now and I am the developer behind the TalkOn.it Network.

Ever since we launched TalkOn.it back in July 2007, the network has mainly focused on Sports and now boasts 46 dedicated websites. It has always been our plan to launch new websites covering different topics in the future.

After a while of developing the network and the forums we feel it is now a good time to start launching some new websites covering Motoring and Technology.

For our Technology websites we have launched Talk Mobiles, Talk HDTV and Talk Consoles. Whilst with Motoring we are aiming to create a website for each major car manufacturers, starting with Ford and Subaru with more currently in the works like Ferrari and Mercedes.

So come over and take a look at our new sites and tell us what you think and keep an eye out for new car websites coming out in the near future!