Our World Airport Codes (WAC) made the shortlist as it has been one of our most popular sites for many years even though we had not worked on it too much during the past couple of years. Nor had we spent any time as a team thinking about how to fully monetise the website… That is of course until recently!

For those unfamiliar, WAC is basically a giant index of vital details regarding over 10,000 of the busiest airports around the world. Providing authentic information on each individual airport’s mapped location, coordinates, runway length & elevation, timezone, airport contact details and of course the area, country and airport code.

We realised that despite WAC’s already high traffic, the number of visitors was continuously and consistently rising even further. Eventually we decided that now was the time to do something with the site to improve it for our high number of visitors so we began by researching the site’s traffic and trying to understand who our users were and why they used our website.

Our research demonstrated that over 20% of our visitors were accessing the site from their mobile devices. This encouraged us to design, create and release a mobile application for both iOS and Android users to improve the experience of the site for those accessing it from a mobile device:

The apps were developed to improve the usability of the site from a mobile device. By also implementing the desired features from the site into the app we have managed to create an application which really does allow the owner to view ‘Every airport in your hands!’

It would still provide the users with the same essential information as the site but direct to your mobile device, wherever you are, within seconds.

Our goal is to be the number one resource for all fields of airport information by members of the following industries:

Commercial Airlines

Travel Agents

Airport Personnel

Aviation Fans

Private Pilots

Freight & Cargo Logisticians

Flight Simulation Gamers

Avid Travellers

The apps are currently priced at a promotional fee of just £0.69 or $0.99 on both the Google Play and iTunes stores. This launch price discount is for a limited time only and will soon return to its RRP of £1.49 / $1.99 (US store).

Although the WAC app has only been available for little more than a week we have been experiencing a positive response from our users. With multiple daily purchases and some very satisfying reviews and ratings already:

“Finding an airport via it’s name or code is super quick and the design is super clean.”

“A nice and simple app that provides runway and airport contact information for thousands of airports around the world.”

“Bought this app as need to check airport codes for work and it seems pretty good so far.”

Available now on iOS & Android

We’re very pleased with how the app has come along and the comments we’ve received but if you have any thoughts, suggestions or feedback in general please feel free to share it with us and we can address these and try to work them into future updates.

Tweet us: @WAC_Official

Contact: http://www.world-airport-codes.com/suggestion.html

Fast forward this by a couple of years, and businesses think they know so much more about their customer than just their name and an email address, and that there are so many great ways of managing that data. In fact, in the digital age there is so much data out there that consumers seem to be more measurable than ever before.

There are bits and pieces of acquired data about the aforementioned Jane scattered all over the place – in the company’s internal support system as she has emailed before, in the list of newsletter subscribers, on a piece of PostIt note as she has rang up a few times, in the company’s Twitter followers list as she has retweeted one or two tweets, her name and phone number is in an old CRM system that the sales team uses, and she might also be registered as a user with the company’s online store but with her maiden name! Jane is essentially providing more and more data about herself and her behaviour. How can you capture all this and store it in an intelligent and cost-effective way?

Can you know too much about your customer? If there’s no way of combining and organising all the data about your customer, why chase it and collect it all? If the data is disjointed and spread across various departments that use different systems, businesses run the risk of alienating customers through repeat communications (emails, snail mail, etc.) or no communication at all! The challenge that businesses in 2013 face are not so much about acquiring the data, but about digesting it and managing it in an optimised way.

Fubra is working on developing a platform called Narrowcast that will bring all this data together, and will plug all these interactions into one natural stream (we call it a conversation at Narrowcast).

The need for such a unified platform arose internally several years ago, when Fubra experienced a rapid growth in terms of staff, online projects, variety of income streams and methods of customer feedback and communication. Email inboxes started splitting at their seams as the amount of correspondence increased and it became vital to develop an internal system for tracking, managing, allocating, and storing those ‘conversations’. We also found we needed a facility to ‘play with the data’ by narrowing customers by the type of enquiry they sent, whether or not they were a registered users of Fubra Passport, whether or not they were subscribers to any of our newsletters, and so on.

Narrowcast as a concept evolved from the need to have a single, centralised environment, which could provide better insights into customers and allow businesses to spot opportunities from their increased and well-organised data.

Time (or lack of) has always been another issue at Fubra and it became obvious it was not being used most efficiently. Narrowcast being a single application will save time and money as it removes the necessity to sign up for multiple applications and CRM systems.

The marketing mantra that the customer comes first is at the core of most businesses, but it’s easy to lose the focus when deadlines are around the corner and there are targets to be hit.

Some of the most difficult tasks is linking numerous data sets, understanding customers better and being channel agnostic in our marketing efforts. If you also feel your customer data is all over the place, Narrowcast might be a solution for your business.

There are three key elements that we’ve integrated into Narrowcast – a CRM, a MailR and a Sales/Marketing tool.

A team set up within Fubra is working hard towards integrating these three aspects to create a new tool that could be adopted by businesses both large and small. In the meantime please submit your email here so that we can get in touch once we open Narrowcast to the public. Watch this space!

What framework should we use?

It came to a bit of discussion about what would be the best framework for the job and a split was found internally regarding which solution should be used. Like the agile company we are, we came across an issue and quickly tried to rectify it with minimal lead time.

There was the toss-up between WordPress or Laravel. Both are great development tools but there was uncertainty about which would be the correct tool for the job; what should World Airport Codes use? WordPress is typically used for blogs or sites with large sections of copy, but it’s quickly expanding to more than just that – something that both beginners and experts find engaging and essential to their business; just take a look at their notable users page.

After some debate, we quickly came up with a decision and also a long term plan of action with some clear definitions; WordPress would be our go to framework.

WordPress Really Can Be A Framework As Well

What is WordPress; is it a framework or a CMS? To look at what it was originally, it was content management system for blogs, but today it’s focus has changed with it becoming a framework. Co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg has said that the team at Automattic are working on “radical simplification” of the WordPress interface, which can only mean that WordPress we know today is moving towards framework model for web applications and not just a CMS.

Take the following Wikipedia article on frameworks:

Frameworks contain key distinguishing features that separate them from normal libraries:

1. inversion of control – In a framework, unlike in libraries or normal user applications, the overall program’s flow of control is not dictated by the caller, but by the framework.
2. default behavior – A framework has a default behavior. This default behavior must actually be some useful behavior and not a series of no-ops.
3. extensibility – A framework can be extended by the user usually by selective overriding or specialized by user code to provide specific functionality.
4. non-modifiable framework code – The framework code, in general, is not allowed to be modified, excepting extensibility. Users can extend the framework, but not modify its code.

Points 3 and 4 are clearly in the realms of WordPress; it’s extensible via plugins and themes and the main WordPress core code should never be edited unless via hooks in a theme or plugin; easy. Points 1 and 2 may be a bit more difficult to understand or get, but lets run through them.

In a framework, unlike in libraries or normal user applications, the overall program’s flow of control is not dictated by the caller, but by the framework.

Here it’s saying that a framework should dictate what functions are called and when they are called. Although it’s possible to call in certain functions when we would like them, it’s in the control of WordPress at the end of the day and we cannot change that directly but only via a request to the core code. In a basic example, WordPress will call a plugin and then it will call the theme; we cannot change that unless we directly change the core code, which we would never do!

A framework has a default behavior. This default behavior must actually be some useful behavior and not a series of no-ops.

The default behavior of WordPress is the ability to display pages, like a mini-site, or a series of linked pages in a conical order, like a blog, or both.

We can create many different types of sites with WordPress that aren’t strictly blogs or even plain websites. Take a look at PetrolPrices.com, it’s a unique site that is run using WordPress that allows developers to code using an existing code base but also our content team to write content using tools they know well.

In essences a framework is a reusable set of code libraries or classes that can be used on multiple projects. How isn’t WordPress this? It you don’t believe me then check out this video from Jeff Pearce at WordCamp Cape Town 2011.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

During our discussion on frameworks, we wanted to create a standpoint for developing sites with WordPress and a cut-off point where a website might not fit WordPress’ way of things.

So how do we decide this? We created a rule that we have to abide by:

Public facing web sites with content pages, directories and search where most users get presented mostly the same information should normally be written in WordPress with custom plugins as needed.

Cool, but there is a clause that can be brought to attention:

For non-standard web applications, we can consider using other frameworks, but we should hold a meeting and get agreement from a meeting with at least 6 technical people, with at least one person from each team (Fubra World, Fubra Core, CATN, Directors). An e-mail should be sent afterwards to all staff informing them of the decision, to give others an opportunity to comment / object. Characteristics of such applications might be:

• Doesn’t resemble a typical website with pages, blog, directory, content, search features
• Every user gets served unique content
• There is a specific reason why WordPress is not suitable

Examples are the main applications for AffJet, Clear Books, but even with those, their public facing websites should still be developed in WordPress.

So we are still very much focused on using the right tool for the job, but we now have a line drawn so that if we have to cross it we will discuss it internally at Fubra deciding what would be the right tool. Sites like AffJet and CatN’s control panel would be no good for WordPress and thus are created in their own respective frameworks; but on that note, CatN’s public website is a WordPress site.

Benefits of United WordPress Development

Our main reason for developing of our sites on WordPress (over 70 and counting) is so that everybody can understand how a site works and can be maintained, even the directors can have a stab at writing a bit of code! It’s also easier for the less technically minded people within Fubra to understand the admin facility WordPress provides and thus get on and do their job.

We are now focusing on creating best practices for WordPress development using a site that we spoke of in our initial meeting as the case study that we hope to carry on with all our WordPress sites. One of my personal goal is to create procedures and technical guidelines for creating well coded sites that are efficient and hopefully rival that of a custom solution.

After reading all of this you must be thinking that I was on the WordPress side of our meeting. I was actually on the side of a general purpose framework. I wanted us to use Laravel, which is a great general purpose framework, but already in legacy we have Zend, Yii and Webtatic so despite how good we think Laravel is right now, the most popular web platform is WordPress and chances are it will be for a long time. There is also a huge number of developers out there who understand and use WordPress, but also it’s easy enough for non-tech minded people to use and create their own unique sites without a single line of code.

Fubra and WordPress

As a company we are hoping to work closely with the WordPress community and provide more thorough solutions to better WordPress and it’s users and developers, but also provide a hosted WordPress solution with CatN hosting. We have already provided a number of popular plugins including WP Survey and Quiz Tool, CDN Sync Tool and Permalink Editor Also, once we’ve come up with our standards for WordPress development, we would like to open that to the community and help every developer/user but also get feedback and hopefully get everybody on a good wave-length of developing for WordPress. I’ll be posting more in the future about developing these standards and how we approached issues with WordPress development so you might want to keep an eye on the Fubra blog!

Clear Books started out as a pure accounting software play but from a very early stage we developed an integrated payroll module. This allowed our small business customers to process their payroll, email out payslips and instantly file joiners and leavers to HMRC.

To date our payroll module has only been available to our accounting software customers. It has never had its own marketing platform… until now.

With the launch of Open Payroll it is now possible to sign up and subscribe to our online payroll software independent of our accounting software.

Start running your payroll in the cloud. Here are five reasons that Open Payroll will improve your business.

1. Anytime, anywhere access – you just need the Internet.
2. Platform independent – works on Mac, Windows or Linux.
3. Save time and quickly submit forms to HMRC online and instantly.
4. Your employees have independent online access to their entire payslip history.
5. No duplication of data – integrated with Clear Books, your online accounting software.

This is a guest post by Peter Zaborszky who founded Renegade Games Ltd in 2008, and received an investment from Fubra subsequently. This is an update on how the business is doing right now.

2012 bought a lot of changes to Renegade Games. While the website Top100arena revenues increased quite considerably, I decided not to develop any online games any more. The vision of SimRepublic that I wanted to create was too large for a small company like Renegade Games, either more capital was needed or a lower quality game, neither of which was an option.

After a lot of thinking about the project (the SimRepublic idea goes back to when I was 16), I decided to stop development on it, since there is a difference between never giving in, and never giving in despite overwhelming evidence you should.

Building a game that goes viral is a lot harder than I thought!

The story is positive from here though, as the change has bought some great changes to the company. After looking at possible websites to buy, and a deal to buy a price comparison site falling through, I decided I would create price comparison and review websites, and after some detailed searching I found a new industry, online backups, that needed a high quality comparison website, and also has the potential profitability for a review website to function (via adverts and affiliate sales).

After working on this backups site for a few months now, I’ve learned a lot about building these sorts of site, and I’m getting close to having a format that I can potentially replicate for other niches, which means I can scale the business. I’ve already started working on the VPN and Webinar industries, but these sites aren’t ready yet.

I’ll probably need to change the company name soon!

BestBackups.com

The site was launched 4 months back with about 12 reviews of online backup providers, and has since grown to over 50 services reviewed, with another 50 articles added that were category specific, for example how to back up your mac online, or linux etc etc.

Online backups are a fast growing industry, there are probably 60-70 major services currently, and this is growing by about 10 companies every year. It’s becoming hard for people to choose a service, which is why I decided to create a review website. These companies all offer different amounts of space, different features, and for a different price, so for someone to choose the right one, they might need some help. That’s where the website comes in, it has detailed reviews of around 55 services now, and the category specific articles I talked about.

Since it’s a growing industry, I’m hoping it will be a very lucrative industry to be reviewing. The site has grown nicely and has been featured on several large blogs, the proudest of which was MacTrast, where we have guest posted twice!

BestBackups had its first profitable month in January, and is showing signs of growth from here on!

Any opinions about the new site is highly welcome!

Alongside this Narrowcast will integrate your customer data with email marketing tools so you can create more effective, profitable and relevant marketing campaigns from the relationships you’ve built with your customers.

Take a look at some working designs for Narrowcast’s CRM

The Narrowcast way

The underlying concept of Narrowcast is to centre the marketing process around the individual and their identity rather than around mass audiences. To us this really made sense, as we can offer advertisers a better way to target their market whilst at the same time displaying advertising that customers are more likely to be interested in and care about.

If you work in the marketing world you’ll have likely heard of concepts such as Big Data and Single Customer View. As a company with lots of customers subscribed to our online products we could see how beneficial it would be to compile all our customer data into a single, individual profile for each of our customers. It means we can know the entire picture when communicating with a customer and not having to waste time sifting through old emails and jumping between varying systems.

Why we’re building Narrowcast…

Let me tell you a story about The Little Big TV Company, they specialise in selling very large TV’s and are typical of many small to medium sized businesses who are busy maintaining a steady cash flow, managing the needs of their employees, dealing with suppliers and growing their business.

These TV’s can be pretty pricey to repair so the company decided that it would be a great idea to contact existing customers whose manufacturers warranty is soon to expire and offer them an additional warranty.

The Little Big TV Company however, didn’t have a database or CRM of their customers and was unable to follow up with those customers whose warranty was about to end, missing a big opportunity to make generate sales as well as spare their existing customers from the possibility of spending a small fortune in gigantic TV repairs.

Although The Little Big TV Company is a fictional company, the story behind it is true and it’s stories like this that drive the Narrowcast project to provide businesses with the tools to know their customers and give them the ability to react based on that knowledge. Ultimately with an effective CRM system the The Little Big TV Company would have been able to provide a much higher level of service that was more personal to it’s customers and in-tern inspired customer loyalty whilst generating sales.

Here’s where we’re at…

Our current focus is on getting Narrowcast up and running with its CRM functionality so we can start using it internally to support our own customers as well as get some user feedback to develop the product.

Looking to the future we’ve got our sights set on releasing this to businesses as a stand alone product. There’s lots of scope to integrate new features that will make Narrowcast everything a business needs to build and utilise the relationships it has with its customers.

In the past our chill out room was used for presentations (internal and external) and you would often see groups of Fubrans gathered around an iMac or MacBook Pro having a video conference. With the recent wave of Fubra babys (and puppies!) more and more staff are working at home a couple of days a week making the need for a dedicated teleconference space greater than ever. The chill out room is also in high demand with more staff on site eating lunch at different times!

The Fubra directors have listened and converted their old upstairs office into a dedicated conference room. Kitted out with a massive 46″, full HD Samsung Smart TV, a wide angle Logitech HD webcam, a group audio system, and a brand new conference room table the Fubra teams are good to go!

The pictures

Check out the new conference room in the photos below.

Both the Fubra World and CatN teams have been using the space quite heavily since it was completed (possibly because there’s a smart TV in the room with an Olympics feed!), so much so we’re looking at setting up a booking system to cope with the high demand. It’s great to see that having a dedicated conference space has improved communication in the company and given us a great set up for holding remote client meetings.

While the Maps API remains free for the vast majority of sites, some developers were worried about the potential costs. In response, we have lowered the online price from US $4 per 1,000 map loads to 50¢ per 1,000 map loads.
— Google Developers Blog

That’s means that Google Maps is now 87.5% cheaper than before for standard map developers. This now makes Google Maps a lot more competitive with other paid for offerings such a MapBox out there. But how exactly does that stack up with a highly visible site?

Working It Out

Working out some basic numbers using one of our own stats on map views on a site Fubra’s Director/Co-Founder, Paul, and myself have worked out a cost comparison.

As you can see it’s a considerable drop in cost from over $36k (~£23k) to $4.5k (~£2.8k) but still a little costly for a site that only uses a map to provide additional visual feed back on data as apposed to it being a main factor. It’s hard to argue that Google should be offering Maps for free as they are expensive to run, but it does show that their original offering of $4 is somewhat excessive and it goes to show they know it all to well by the slash. We still feel that $4.5k for a site that makes very little money is too much, and if we did have to pay for a solution we would rather partner with a smaller business. But we aren’t charging access to use the maps on our sites, they are in fact open to all to see with Google’s logo in the bottom always on show.

Our solution to use Open MapQuest still proves to be free for us, and on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, for us free is good for a great quality crowd-sourced solution.

It will be interesting to see if people would move back to Google Maps when our workings showed they are cheaper then MapBox; but MapBox have the start-up feel that a lot of other individuals and smaller companies would look towards as apposed to Google.

It’s Not All About Costs

It has to be said that Google are well established with servers that can take the load of a huge number of users accessing their maps and they are very well documented. Being possibly one of the biggest mapping providers out there, you can’t argue that you won’t get what you pay for. But saying that, if they are one of the biggest mapping providers then surely majority of sites maps look the same and their implementations are very copy & paste? Of course you can have styled maps and there is typically more than one way to skin a cat, but through some experimentation we’ve been doing here, to move away from the base model that Google Maps provide with their API was very more of a hack and didn’t quite fit in with what we wanted. Suffice to say, Google Maps isn’t an open source solution and sometimes that’s what you need more than something that quick and easy to implement.

I mentioned in my previous post that one of things we found with our choice solution of Open MapQuest gave us details that previously where missing from Google Maps, but it’s more than that that keeps us using Open MapQuest and the Leaflet API. There is a sense of freedom in what we are now developing with maps, Google Maps caused us to be very rigid and most of the time forced us into a box that we didn’t like the look and feel of and the box was all too familiar to that point it was boring; nobody likes a boring box and boring websites aren’t that great to use.

Six Months On

Having used a free, open solution for over six months now we aren’t in a position to look back to Google Maps, even with the massive reduction in price. That initial charge we were faced with has opened our eyes in regards to mapping solutions and thus caused us to solve problems differently. It’s also allowed us to see that although a product is popular and well supported, it might not fit your solution; the case of Google Maps not showing airports on the map yet OpenStreetMap’s data showed us what we needed made us wonder why we didn’t do this before! For the majority of locations we check, the data is more complete, and if it’s not then we are able to update the data either in a number of ways, helping contribute to the OSM community and making it grow.

Google Maps is a quick product and allows ideas to develop very quickly, but it’s more of a prototyping tool for us that somewhat akin to front-end coding solutions like Twitter’s Bootstrap in that it helps get an idea off the ground and into the public but not something that you’ll develop any long term plan. As we have all the code for Leaflet API available to us, we can edit it in any way we wish to suit our means, and access to the CSS is a must have in this day-and-age of web apps. The API for Leaflet in my opinion is much more of a pleasure to use that allows us to move in directions we may not of thought to previous.

We no longer think that Google Maps is the best out there, it’s by far the most complete with a number of solutions built in, but saying it’s the best is subjective and we’re not in that camp. Open MapQuest API offer resources that will help in regards to getting a more complete solution, sometimes offering more than what you get with Google Maps API.

At a later date I will post more on the experience of making a web app (I’m in-between writing about our RoutePlanner app for PetrolPrices.com) with open source solutions. But I thought I’d write my response on Google Maps latest change and how we are still committed to our open source solution to the point that we are sponsoring State Of The Map 2012 so be sure to check that out! Here’s a look at our sponsor slide…

I’m very pleased to announce that revenue from adverts on the transfers pages of our Airport Guides network (http://www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/taxi-transfer.html) has now reached in excess of £10,000 a month.

We’ve been very close to this target for a few months now so it’s a great personal achievement to finally surpass this figure.

What I’ve Done:

Here are three simple rules we use at Fubra that I believe have helped me achieve this goal:

Ensure Lead Quality – There is no point in contacting a company whose advert won’t perform well on our site. An irrelevant advert would not benefit from our services properly. It would also disrupt the experience for users as they are using the site for their own needs.

Before initial contact I first confirmed that the potential lead provides a relevant service, in this case airport transfers, and also that they operate to or from the local area.

I also discovered that our advertisers, as well as the users of our A.G sites, benefit greater from a wide choice of transfer options. Taxi, chauffeur, minibus and coach all provide a different service and between them cover all needs a potential customer may have. I now aim to get a variety of travel companies advertising, not just taxis.

Even a couple of limousine and coach companies have advertised with us!

Assist Customers/Advertisers – Although our subscriptions include no fixed contract, I always aim towards building a long-term partnerships with each of our advertisers. The best way for us to do this is by helping them build a successful advert and proving our competence when an issue or query arises.

We also closely monitor the performance of each advert and are always willing to share the stats we have for an advert with the advertiser. We would also help an advertiser try and improve the efficiency of their advert if needed.

I believe that advertising is trial and error, and I often suggest trying a few different structures to find out what works best for each companies’ advert.

Welcome Feedback – All input helps us make the decisions to improve our sites/services. If there’s a problem (negative feedback), we can take it on board to resolve the issue in the most rewarding way for all involved. All positive feedback is used to boost my confidence and give me job satisfaction.. So thanks!!

The really positive comments also make it onto the Testimonials page of our sites:
http://www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/testimonials.html

For those of you who aren’t familiar with AffJet, it’s an application for affiliate marketers which aggregates all of your affiliate marketing statistics in one place for easy network analysis and bigger profits.

Below are some screenshots of the new designs, and you can read more about the changes we have made, or try it our for yourself at AffJet.com.