Getting your yearbooks can be really exciting… but now we’re making it even more exciting with a little competition we’ve just launched which can win you £200 just by taking a photo and sending it to us when you get your books.

So what are you waiting for? If you’ve already got your yearbooks from us get snapping!

UPDATE: We’ve extended the closing date from 31st August 2010 to midnight on Monday 6th September 2010.

If you’re an avid and observant user of our awesome online service, you may notice bump-up in speed and reliability of our website from today onwards. We’ve migrated to some lovely new hardware with more speed, memory and overall grunt — meaning faster and easier creation of your yearbook!

We’ve also brought online further servers to help us with two important tasks: creating previews of your books (the ‘Update PDF’ feature) and sending your books to the printing press when all is ready-to-go.

Right now everyone here at AllYearbooks is incredibly busy helping our customers finish the content of their yearbooks off, creating collages, awards pages, covers and lots more. Big boss man Jake is sending dozens of yearbooks off to print each and every day

Follow these 5 top tips to ensure your yearbook isn’t the “Worst yearbook ever”:

• allow us to make up to 10 collage pages for you… they look lovely!
• use our online system and allow members to upload their own photos rather than using low-resolution ones taken by the school photographer
• allow us to help you design a really snazzy cover for your yearbooks, or run a competition amongst students for ‘best cover design’ and use that one
• get a teacher on board asap, ensuring they proof read your yearbook well in time for your delivery deadline. Don’t leave it until the last minute to involve a teacher and then find they want you to get rid of all the stuff you thought was funny, but the school thinks is outrageous
• add some of our pre-made message/signature pages at the back of the book, or dotted throughout it, giving people space to add messages to each other on book hand-out day

Of course, another option is to completely ignore our advice and then use the following image on the back cover to prove it was intentionally pants rather than just a complete lack of effort.

A lovely article just came out in The Guardian talking about how yearbooks are really taking off now here in the UK. We were featured heavily in the article, including quotes I made – all very exciting

We can’t wait to see the article in the printed copy of the Education Guardian tomorrow!

You can read the full article on the Education Guardian website.

In the past, and with many of our competitors, you’d wait months from when you think your yearbook is complete until you get it delivered, partly because of a long and laborious proofing process. Not with us.

With our advanced online system, we put you in control of the whole proofing process. No more waiting for a yearbook company to prepare, print and post pages back to you.

At any time as an editor of your yearbook can ‘Update PDF’… that is, re-create the a PDF copy of your yearbook taking into account all the changes members have made to their pages since the last time the PDF was created. You can then download the PDF, view it in your browser and even print it.

This PDF file is the exact same file we send to the printers along with a file for your yearbook’s cover.

Spot a problem with a page minutes before your deadline? Just correct the appropriate page online and ‘Update PDF’. Sooo easy.

Because often the PDF can be many tens of megabytes in file size, we highly recommend only downloading it when you absolutely need to. For many tasks, it’s more useful just to browse low-res JPG copies of all the pages online instead, using our handy page browsing feature.

Just one more reason to create your yearbooks online with AllYearbooks

You can upload two types of photos into your yearbooks: profile photos and collage photos. Profile photos are used on your individual profile pages (or at least your space on that page if more than one person per page), and collage photos are uploaded into photo folders such as “Summer Party 2009″ which can then be made into photo collages by either you or us – we do up to 10 stunning collages for you included in the price

So how many collage photos do groups upload into their yearbooks? Well, here’s a look at how many photos are in St Catharine’s College, Cambridge’s online yearbook:

That’s right… over 2,000 photos! But that’s by no means the most we’ve ever seen. In first place this year is King’s College London, School of Medicine, where 262 final year medics have so far uploaded 4,740 photos. Cranbourne College isn’t far behind with 4,618 photos uploaded by the 196 students – that’s over 23 photos per person!

Whilst in theory we can cram 500 photos on a page, you’ll only see a few mm of each one, so probably not a great idea. We usually recommend between 20 and 100 photos per page, meaning King’s College would need at least 50 pages just for all their photos. Looking at their near-complete yearbook, they only have about a dozen pages left for their budget. So what should they do?

There are two options:

• use our quick photo management tool to select the best photos, deleting or moving into unused folders the rest
• get a CD with all the photos and anything else you can cram on, adding just £2 to the cost of your books!

Our CDs are usually printed professionally on the top side and affixed to the inside back cover of your yearbooks, inside a transparent plastic sleeve.

You can also consider a data DVD for one more British pound, and some groups put other stuff on the disk too, such as videos they’ve taken around school, as well as a PDF copy of the yearbook itself.

Happy uploading!

After sending 10 yearbooks to print this morning I was amazed by the number of them that were hardback rather than paperback, so I did a bit of number crunching.

It turns out that this academic year we’ve seen a marked change in the percentage of our customers going for hardback yearbooks, particularly laminated hardback (glossy, full-colour cover) yearbooks. We like this because if we were going to get a yearbook we’d get laminated hardback because, frankly, we just prefer it to the the other options.

As the pie charts above show, we offer four types of yearbooks: stitch-folded paperbacks (STI); perfectbound paperbacks (PB); laminated hardbacks (LHB) and leather-effect hardbacks (LEH). Whilst our two hardback options last year accounted for 42% of our books, this year they’re down to just 27%, with laminated hardbacks coming in at a massive 55% and leather-effect hardbacks up to 18%.

So why is everyone going for hardbacks this year? Quite possibly partly because our prices have come down across the board this year, making all our options more affordable and hence encouraging people to make the £4 jump from paperback to laminated hardback. Or maybe it’s because we’re coming out of recession and people want to splash out a bit? Who knows!

Enjoy your yearbooks

Easter holidays are now over, and it’s back to school again for most of our customers.

We’ve been busy working with you on your yearbooks over the Easter break, and now we’re really ramping up the number of yearbooks we’re sending to print each week.

If you haven’t already, figure out when you need your yearbooks delivered and be aware of the deadline that sets you. Whilst we do print and deliver books much faster than many of our competitors, we can’t do complete miracles.

We apologise for the downtime the site has experienced yesterday (1 hour) and today (5 hours).

The downtime was caused primarily by a corrupt table in the database (which was fixed without damage) which caused a domino effect of other problems.

We believe we’ve now addressed the issues but we’re be checking the server as often as possible over the weekend and next week to ensure everything is running smoothly.

The world needs a new hero. The world needs… Mr Yearbook Man! Coming soon to a screen near you.