We love saving energy! One way we do that is by using low-powered laptops rather than bigger power-hungry monster machines. Web and other types of servers tend to live in big racks which require lots of extra power to cool them all. We just have two laptops and a couple of external USB drives instead.

At the bottom ofthe picture is ‘The Server’ - in fact, the Post it note we’ve stuck on top of it has the word ’server’ on it just in case someone forgets. We’ve got Ubuntu Linux running on there.

Connected to ‘The Server’  by a flimsy USB cable is ‘The Z Drive’ where we store all our customers files. They’re all encrypted so if some evil person were to steal it they wouldn’t be able to see any data on it at all. These used to live on ‘The Server’ but we soon ran out of space.

Next up is my favourite laptop/computer ever - ‘The Tablet’. You can actually write on the screen of this laptop with a special pen (hence ‘tablet’), but these days this machine just sits there waiting for us to chuck Word, Publisher and other such files at it and out pops PDFs ready to put into your yearbooks. Veyr useful.

Next row up is another external USB drive, which of course is also encrypted. The one shown is ‘Mr Black’, but we also have ‘Mr Red’. They do our backups and we alternate them each day to ensure that if the office were ever to blow up then we’d have a backup from at most one working day before. Peace of mind there, then.

Our collage backlog is now down to just 80 collages, and this funky chappy is largely to thank for that. Meet Tom with his awfully sophisticated graphics tablet that he uses to create some really awesome collages for your yearbooks. Having Tom here has helped free up Pratik and Ben’s time so they can create ever more elaborate covers for your yearbooks and deal with the many requests that drop into our helpdesk by phone, email and chat every day.

And keeping with the AllYearbooks way, Tom lives within minutes walk of the office here in sunny Cambridge. In fact, we timed him going home and back to pick up a sandwich and he was back in the office 4 minutes after leaving!

There are many, many good reasons to create your yearbooks online with us. But by analyzing the Twitter stream I’ve come across the following quotes from people who are obviously not using us for their yearbooks:

• “They spelled my last name, and some of my friend’s last names wrong in the yearbook. I say we sue them for publishing false information.” by KelseaSays
• “09 doesn’t even DESERVE me “this is seriously the worst yearbook ever… seriously my name is mentioned once” _Laura Cortez” by hanbanjo
• “Yearbook didn’t place my senior quote… :(” by Notoriety

So how exactly do we solve these problems? Well with us, everyone in the year can create their own entry online on our website. It’s all collaborative, you see. The yearbook is created by everyone rather than just a handful of editors.

• Misspelt names? Only if you spell your own name wrong!
• Name only mentioned once? With us, you get a full entry, usually with 2 photos and masses of text!
• Your quote not in the book? It will be with us, as you’ll write it online and thus it will automatically be in the book

So please, please… make life easier for yourself and avoid the many potential pitfalls in old-fashioned yearbook creation methods. Create your yearbooks online with us.

Here are six lovely and colourful yearbooks we’ve just finished working on and delivered to happy customers. A mixture of laminated hardback and paperback yearbooks, both of which allow for full colour and glossy covers, front and back. We prefer these to the two-colour and more expensive leather-effect hardbacks and so do most of our customers.

Whilst 95% of our yearbooks are currently created for customers here in the UK, we do make the odd book for customers in Europe and further afield as they get wowed by our time-saving web-based yearbook system.

Here’s a glowing testimonial we just got from a customer in the Netherlands:

Without Allyearbooks, I honestly do not know where we would have been. At first, a little hesitant to be the first year to use an online company and at that, one overseas, we soon found out what a life savior both the site AND the staff were. We wanted a completely original book and layout and Allyearbooks not only had no problems whatsoever with that but also helped us to enhance and perfect our pages, continually guiding us towards making the best yearbook in the history of our school. The Allyearbooks team are great, always there to help and I even remember talking to someone on the eve of Easter Friday to sort out an emergency! The quality of the book is incredible and the price even more fantastic when you take into account that we ordered from The Netherlands. To top that, they even managed to get us hard back books in the 3 weeks designated for paper back books. Everyone in my form is so grateful and come the last day of school when they were all handed out, people could not put them down.

Kristy Samal
The British School of the Netherlands

Thanks Kristy, we’re glad we could help!

Our standard time for printing and delivering yearbooks from when they’re completely ready-to-print is about 4 to 5 weeks - far, far less than the 3+ months quoted by some of our competitors.

But that’s just what we ‘guarantee’. In actual fact, often we’re faster. And sometimes we’re much faster.

A yearbook we’ve just recently made for some crazy medical students was submitted as ready-to-print on Friday, 8th of May. All the pages were printed a week later on Friday, 15th May and then the books were bound, finished and ready-to-deliver on Wednesday 20th May, meaning they could be delivered on Thursday 21st May. That’s under two weeks for over 200 hardback books with over 100 pages per book.

Paperbacks can be quicker still. As is often the case, a school was waaaay late with their yearbooks but finally got them ready-to-print on Friday 22nd May. All the pages were printed the following Wednesday, 27th May, an especially impressive feat seeing as Monday 25th was a bank holiday. Then on Friday, 29th May the books were finished and ready-to-deliver, despatched the same day for delivery to our customer tomorrow, Monday 1st June. That’s approximately one week to print, bind and deliver 150 paperback yearbooks with around 50 pages per book.

We’re working very closely with our printers this year to try to make these super-fast turnaround times the norm rather than the exception, and we’re finding that most of our customers now are getting emails from us to tell them their books are ready-to-deliver ahead of schedule. That’s an awful lot of delighted customers as a result

A week and a half ago I blogged to say that we’re right in the middle of the year book busy season and that as a result of that and Ben being on holiday we had a big backlog of collages to make.

Since then Ben has returned from his holiday and is currently blasting through the collages with Pratik. Our backlog has decreased from a peak of around 350 collages to make to just over 200. We were hoping to have the backlog down to more like 150 by now but have just missed that target, but hope to be there by the end of the week.

What does this mean to customers waiting for us to make collages for them? Fear not! Your collages haven’t been lost into an abyss and will be worked on very soon now. And our creating collages for you won’t delay your yearbook delivery.

Meanwhile, most of our secondary school Y11 and Y13 customers are off enjoying themselves on half-term. Alas, whilst some of us took Bank Holiday Monday off, we’ve been working hard this week on all your yearbooks.

This guy with the super cheesy smile is Pratik - who actually started working with us at the beginning of April before Ben, but who was too lazy (well… busy with collages anyway) to write a blog post. So I’ll embaress him by writing one for him instead

Whilst Ben is currently behind the scenes just working through collages and a few polls pages, Pratik is now a bit more front-line, dealing with new enquiries, answering emails, answering your questions on our great online-chat system, and chasing you to make your deadlines on time. All of this, and he still does loads of collages as well!

But the best thing about Pratik? Today he came to work with a massive Tupperware container filled with curry for us all to eat. And tasty it was… yummy. [It has to be added though that whilst Pratik had the strenuous task of carrying it to work, it was his loving mummy who used her culinary skills in the kitchen with this dish.]

So, a big welcome from us all to Pratik. Together David, Nic, Ben and Pratik make a wonderful customer-wrangling and design team.

Almost everyone wants their school yearbooks at approximately the same time of year - between the beginning of May and the end of August (or more specifically, GCSE results day which is a week after A-Level results day). That’s four out of 12 months of the year, 1/3 of the year. We’re creating yearbooks for over 300 customers this year, and 290 of those will be printed in this period - over 95% of all our books.

Needless to say, we call this period the “busy season” - and boy is it busy!

Our team has grown in the last two months from me and Jamey (the geek team) and Nic and David (the customer wranglers). We’ve taken on Pratik and Ben to help with extra customer wrangling. That’s right, ‘wrangling - almost all of you need a bit of this wrangling to get your books to the printers on time

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a backlog of work at the moment, partly caused by our commitment to awesome personal customer service for all our customers, and taking time and care with all the custom artwork we do.

For every customer we offer up to 10 pages of collages from photos you upload to the website. This is one of our cool selling points - our collages really are amazing, and we receive soooooo many lovely comments about them. But they’re not created automagically like our member profile pages - they require love and care by our customer wranglers who diligently create them on their spanking new computers with swanky graphics tablets and massive monitors.

Now the maths - we send of around 20 books a week, or 4 per working day. At 10 collages per customer, that’s 40 collages a day. Woah! Ben’s been away for a couple of weeks so unfortunatley a bit of a backlog has developed - around 326 collages as I write this (and no doubt more by tomorrow morning). Eeks. But fear not! We’ll be chaining Ben and Pratik to the desk all week, gluing their eyes open and setting them up with a caffeine drip. They’ll be working through the collages on a who-goes-to-print-next priority order. By the end of the week we hope to have thoroughly worked them both to exhaustion but have got the backlog down to between 150 and 200.

In total so far we’ve made approximately 800 collage pages this year. That’s 800 stunningly designed pages for our customers to cherish for years to come.

We also lovingly create covers for every customer who doesn’t design their own, and also polls/awards pages for those wanting one. Again - these take time by real people and aren’t created by the system. There’s backlogs for these too, but they’re far smaller (14 covers and 12 polls).

So we’re very sorry if you’ve submitted collages, polls or a cover for us to make and we haven’t yet made them - but we haven’t forgotten about you! They’ll all be ready in time for the deadlines you’ve given us for your books, and when we’ve made them, we really think you’ll love them

250 copies of a lovely laminated hardback yearbook have just been handed out eager students at William Farr Comprehensive School in Lincoln. Here’s what they had to say about the books:

“It was our leavers day today and the books were finally given out. The students were amazed and the quality of the whole book and spell bound by the fact that their memories of the past 5 years were captured in such a way. I’ve already had parents speaking to me thanking me for the book. You’ve really done us proud. Your team have been amazingly patient with me as a total ‘technophobe’ and made it as  easy as anything - even answering the same questions a thousand times. The prompt delievery and the aftercare have also been amazing.  I would use you again in a shot and will be recommending to colleagues.  THANK YOU so much!!!”

And thank you too! We’re really very glad to be able to help people crystalize their memories for many years to come.