Merry Xmas and Happy New Year from Affino

2015 has been and is nearly gone, but not without it’s highs and lows. As a Chelsea fan it’s definitely felt like a long autumn but as a football fan it’s great to see the world start to put FIFA in order. Even more important has been the Paris climate agreement which is such a great step forward with the whole world agreeing to look after mother earth.

Media and publishing owners have started to realise that malvertisements, ad blocking and privacy tools are going to change they way they can run their digital business. Most people’s realisation is still just at the tip of the iceberg stage, but we fully expect 2016 to be the year when full realisation dawns and companies start taking action.

Affino has made some big advances this year. We finally cracked the Responsive Design nut with our new v7 responsive framework. Whilst the v6 framework was our fastest, most standards compliant approach yet it was lacking usability. The new v7 framework changes all that and will bring back the DIY nature that’s always been associated with building sites on Affino.

We’ve seen our clients launch some great new sites, not least Briefing Media with the new FG Insight site fginsight.com and the new TTG (Travel Trade Gazette) site ttgmedia.com. Other notable launches have been the Ecommerce Worldwide (EWW) site and the gradual move to responsive at Procurement Leaders. We also loved the launch of our company supported charity Humanity Direct, who enable direct fundraising and donations for life changing surgery. We also managed to sneak out our own update to responsive for Affino.com and have a host of great new site launches coming either side of the Xmas break.

We’ve launched five new releases of Affino during the year with a sixth coming out later this week, which meets our target of one every two months on average. It’s fair to say that three aspects have dominated 2015 when it comes to Affino: Responsive Design, Blocking Prevention and CRM. In all three areas we’ve been making ground-breaking strides which will really come to fruition in Q1 2016, except for the Blocking Prevention where Affino is absolutely excelling. The Affino Digital Business Suite has further established itself as the absolute market leader for full experience delivery.

The Affino team has gone from strength to strength over the year, with the addition of a whole new projects team. We’ve needed to re-invent the way we delivered projects over the past 12 months, and although it was painful at first, the move to agile and our new diamond team formation has been the breakthrough we needed and is now delivering great outputs week in and week out. Affino’s design and build and the core platform development teams have also strengthened considerably with phenomenal and ever improving service levels, great new functional delivery, and great looking sites.

Affino’s breakthrough service introduction this year has been the new Blocking Audit platform and service. We’ve been working with publishers and media companies to identify the scale of their problem and develop the most effective strategies to adapt to the new world where the experienced being delivered is no longer the experience readers and viewers are receiving. We’ve made real breakthroughs in identifying and helping to reduce the revenue and analysis gaps that companies are facing.

We’re looking forward to 2016 in a big way with so many projects coming to fruition in the first quarter, and great existing and new clients, partners and stakeholders to work with. Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year for 2016.