since I updated everyone on the website,where we are and any future plans…
Normaly I post this sort of updates in here for a couple weeks and then move it to the feedback forum… this one will be no different 
First and lets get the nasty bit out of the way, the reccession has hit hard, it has probably hit the transport industry harder than many others. that has a knock on effect on us, suppliers and advertisers entrench and keep their money in their pockets, this means some of our plans for what we wanted to provide have been put on hold.
In February this year we took offline around 70% of the old TruckNet UK website and concerntrated on upgrading the forums, before we went offline with the old website we were averaging around 1.2 million page views a month.
After we took the old site offline, as expected our page views dipped to around 800,000 a month, our aim was to get back to 1.2 million page views for the forums alone by the end of the year,
Last month we exceeded that figure 
THANK YOU verified by three independant respected analytic companies (Omniture, Google and Statcounter)
to give an idea of just how much traffic that is, our bandwidth usage last month was over 178.5 Gigabytes.
to put that into perspective, ALEXA rates TruckNet UK in the top 200,000 websites in the world, in the top 17 trucking related websitesand the top Business > Transportation and Logistics > Trucking > Truck Transport > Truck Drivers drivers website.
ALEXA is only one of many “guides” to the internet, and its results are skewed by the fact it relies on people who have the ALEXA toolbar installed to track it results, even so to achieve that high a placement is a credit to the content you guys provide.
Things are going to change though 
as we come out of reccession poeple are starting to want to advertise, so we are going to make changes to the forums… 
but not ones you will hopefully notice too much, we are in the process of changing some of the coding that runs the forums, so on each forum we can place those dreaded adverts- you know the ones, the ones down the right hand side
Hopefully you all wont notice much change, except the “new and wannabe” forum may carry adverts for driver training schools, the Euro forum may have adverts for ferries, and Bullys bar will advertise – oh god I am scared to even contemplate who would advertise there
I can tell you now, there is a budget for us to be yet again at TruckFest Peterborough 2010 and we will be providing again the free hospitality area and all that entails. It may be next years post christmas party may not as in previous years enjoy a free bar, If it doesnt we will think about wether to hold the “Crazy Auction” as we realise that money is tight all round.
For the future?
We have some plans I hope to tell you about early next year, but I can tell you that we are starting to bring the competitions (for prizes ) from the magazines into the forums, we want to get more of your ideas and issues into the magazines and we want to bring your input directly to the manufacturers, these plans will hopefully be expanded upon in early 2010
To summate, contrary to some peoples beliefs, TruckNet UK continues to grow, the owners , RBI, continue to invest time and money into it,the volunteer team continue to spend their time and effort keeping the website on track and you the members continue to take it forward. Its been a hard year for us all, but we are still here. Thank you again.
