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.

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.