The Fubra Blog
Finding the best airport transport
Many of Fubra’s websites are based around travel because we know how hard it can be to make sure that you get the best deal on your travel and transport costs. We wanted to make sure that all our travel based websites offer you an easy way to find the best, most relevant, direct and cheapest way to travel.
Flying is an increasingly popular method of transport and often the fastest and even cheapest way to get abroad. This inevitably involves visiting airports around the UK which can be pretty confusing places sometimes and even for frequent fliers there tend to be a lot of rules and regulations that must be adhered to, along with changes in flight times which it’s good to keep up to speed on before setting off for the airport!
We set up our Airport Guides years ago, but gave them a fresh new look last year, which has proven to be very popular so far. We have not stopped working on them since though, and have recently worked hard to get the transportation section up to date and give it a fresh new look to make sure everyone can find what they are looking for.
There are 23 UK Airport Guides which we run so getting the new layout and content live on all of them will take a while longer, but here’s a sneak preview of things to come with the rest of them from the now live Gatwick airport transport page.
Transport to and from Gatwick Airport
The transport pages now cover many different methods to help you get to and from the airports. Gatwick Airport for example, has links from trains, coaches, and buses as well as being easily accessible by car. The transport you choose is going to be based on many factors, so we have made sure we have thoroughly looked into each area of travel into and out of the airports and found the benefits and drawbacks applying across them all, to help you make the best decision to suit your needs. Take a look at the latest offers from our travel providers to make sure you are getting the best deal possible.
In addition to this page we will be creating dedicated pages for each transport provider telling you all about what you can expect from them, and the special deals available from that provider. These pages will also include things like routes offered and possibly booking engines to make booking easier.These are coming soon, so keep an eye out!
Special offers applying at the moment include no booking fee for all online bookings of a National Express coach. The opportunity to save up to 43% on train tickets and savings of up to 78% on your airport parking through us! We have also added a Google map to help you familiarise yourself with the location of the airports and plan your car journey.
Let us know what you think of the new design, and I will keep you updated on new additions to the Airport Guides as we go!
PHP Skills Test for Web Developers
We’re always looking to expand our team with talented web developers, so we built an online PHP exam to help us assess applicants before they come to interview. The test is made up of two parts, with 15 questions in total. The first part contains 7 multiple choice questions, and the second part has 8 questions that require a written response. The questions are mostly about PHP, with a couple on CSS / xHTML and a few on MySQL.
So if you think you might like to work for Fubra as a PHP / MySQL / Web developer, then proceed to the 20 minute PHP Developer Quiz. Once we’ve marked your PHP test, we will write to you to let you know whether we would like to see your CV, and if that meets our requirements, we would then look to arrange an interview.
Free Simple Video Player Icon Set
Last week I started working with the YouTube Chromeless API in an attempt to remove the bulky default look and declutter the user interface.
Part of this process involved creating a number of simple icons for the video controls (replay, play, pause etc) which we have decided to share with you in .psd format – download them now for free…
Download Icon Set (.psd)
The Flash YouFuTube interface is now nearing completion, so I’ll be posting more details on that and how you can integrate it into your own site very soon!
Moving to Google Apps
This week we decided to take the plunge and finally migrate our internal e-mail system to Google Apps. I’ve been using Gmail personally since it launched, and I’ve always been impressed with its amazing spam fighting abilities and the general level of innovation throughout the system.
Up until now we’ve hosted our own e-mail servers in-house, and whilst that has given us a high degree of flexibility, it’s also been a pain to configure, maintain and keep spam free!
We’re particularly happy with gmail’s filters – previously we had to edit a maildrop filter file on our server in order to set up new rules. Not only does Google provide a simple interface to configure them, it also gives us the ability to choose whether they are marked as read when they come in. I know it’s possible to replicate this in a desktop mail client, but it’s much better to do it on the server – that way if you access your e-mails from multiple devices, they will be organised the same way on each one. This is particularly handy for us as we receive a fair amount of auto-generated notification e-mails from our various web sites which we don’t need to read as they come in but we do like to keep to refer back to.
So the key benefits to us are:
- Simplified and improved filter configuration
- Improved spam detection
- Excellent web mail platform
- Shared calendars
- Easier Administration for setting up new users and groups.
- Takes less time to maintain.
We also plan to become a Google App’s Authorised Reseller over the next few months, so that we can resell these services via hoston.it
Introducing Apex Gaming Web Illustration
We’ve been working closely with two talented web game developers, Bytewire Games the creators of Street Crime and Renegade Games owners of Apex Web Gaming, Republic Online and Planetarion.
Now in partnership with Apex we are setting up a games illustration service. No job is too tough and for a fee we will draw anything you need or even redesign your site from scratch.
Many developers don’t have the time or the resources to create their own artwork and Apex has over 2,000 web games that could take advantage of this service.
At the moment we are charging clients on the basis of how much time it takes to create an image. Some graphics like the plot above may take up to a week to design, whilst smaller images such as the ones I’ve designed for our first client can take a couple of hours for a whole set.
Were hoping this will be a very useful service that will bring attention to both apex and Fubra in the future.
For more information or to get a quote click here for more information.