A huge well done to all those involved in our latest behind the scenes project the Fubra copywriting system is in order! Internally Jonathon, Matt, Jake and Hannah have been working hard to develop a system that is both easy to use and allows us to easily manage a total now of 136 writers. Those writers are helping us produce the majority of our content for our web sites under the guidance of Jake and Hannah.

The rate of growth has been phenomenal, with writers telling their friends and then their friends requesting to join the system and participate. The rate of development of new features and ideas to support the growth has been no less so. Already we now have over 1,000 projects complete with articles varying in length from 200-6000 words being produced, and over a dozen writers already earning thousands of pounds.

After adding some final finishing touches to the system I hope we can package the system and offer this as another successful internal system to add to the Fubra Toolbox and make available to other companies who need help with research and writing content for their own web sites.

As of the 31st January 2007 we are please to announce that Fubra has been assigned a national signalling point code by the national telecoms regulator, Ofcom. Point codes are allocated to Public Electronic Communications Networks or providers of Public Electronic Communications Services, and allow them to uniquely identify their switches at the point where interconnects occur.

In plain English, this means that we are able to go directly to Ofcom to request telephone number allocations for our various communications services.

Our initial allocation of 80,000 x 0844 numbers will be used for a call monitoring and revenue generation service for one of our web-based business directories, as well as a call tracking service for members of the public who sell items on classified websites, but who do not wish to publish their geographic telephone number.

I got a mail from Hitwise today letting us know that we have got our 5th top 10 award based on the amount of UK traffic that our site OurProperty.co.uk gets.

That's great news in a way as it means we are the 7th most visited property site on the internet here is what the top 7 looks like now:

1. Rightmove.co.uk - Rightmove plc
2. Vebra.com - Guardian
3. Primelocation.com - DMGT
4. Findaproperty.co.uk - DMGT
5. PropertyFinder.com - News International
6. Homesonview.com - Core Systems
7. OurProperty.co.uk - Fubra

The bad news is that we were number 7 in the previous quarter as well so this is the first quarter that we haven't improved our position by one place since we started winning the award.

The main reason for this is that we have been a bit slow in developing new features for the web site because we have had to deal with an office move and developing better back end systems to cope with our next level of growth which takes a while but should be well worth the wait.

The good news is that most of that is now done so with a following wind and a bit of luck I expect to see us rising to 2nd position this year and hopefully taking the top spot some time in 2008.

Our web site was getting very, very old and so we have decided to re-vamp it a bit so that it gives people a bit more of an idea about what we actually do.

I am ashamed to say that we had kept our old web site for so long since it did not really describe our company and lead most visitors to believe that we are a web design consultancy. We got asked frequently if we could help with people's internet ideas and it was my job to explain that I was sorry but our current web site is a bit old and we no longer do any web development or consultancy work for clients.

The response was mixed some people said 'ok thanks anyway' and others got pretty angry! So hopefully our new site, while it still has a long way to go, gives people a bit more of a taster of what we actually do.

Our mission at the moment is to build up a base of advertising clients who will pay us to appear on our network of web sites and make sure that we use the money that they pay us to make better web sites and improve the sites we already have by adding new features.

You might notice a lot of our sites are not yet launched even though they are on our web site with logos. This is really so that you can get more of an idea of the bigger picture at our company. We are intending to build a lot more web sites and it's important to me that people who visit the site realise the size of our ambitions.

At the moment we are running 55 web sites that receive over 3 million visits per month generating 36 million page impressions, there are approaching 2 million subscribers to our central login database, Fubra Passport, and 96% of our visitors are based in the UK and aged between 21 and 70.

We expect that 2007 will be our big year and we will start to create a household name in the UK but we have got a lot of hard work ahead and a long way to go so wish us luck and if you like any of our sites tell your friends about them!