Expometals.net - Let's take stock of 2014

"And here I am, as every year, at the end of 2014 to take stock of the situation regarding your/our industry portal Expometals.net.
There's a small premise that I consider important: Expometals is an international project, but still, this company is based in Italy (province of Lecco), thus underlying Italian bureaucracy and taxation; those who do business in Italy know what I mean.
Despite this, in 2014 the project Expometals grew much, not to say very much. To give you some data, in terms of visits we grew an astounding + 53.31% compared to 2013 (data certified by Google Analytics) reaching almost 20,000 monthly visits. In terms of featured companies (online exhibitors), Expometals grew by 23.47% to almost 270 advertisers currently using the portal.

This year we have been working on several fronts:

STRUCTURAL IMPROVEMENTS

- We moved to larger headquarters allowing staff to grow with the arrival of a new internal employee.

- We assigned to each client company a personal tutor, who interfaces various times during the year with the company's contact person, assisting him/her in the publication of new contents and suggesting the best web communication strategies.

- We worked on optimizing the programming code, improving the portal in terms of structural and content organization, to make it more SEO-friendly (= acceptable to search engines / predisposed to a better indexing).

- A new important feature was implemented: the opportunity for the visitors to request an offer has been integrated in each product of the companies exhibiting on the portal.

- Russian language has been introduced, both in the online stands and in the platform. Russian is now available alongside English, German, Italian, Spanish and French.

- Specific filters in the most “crowded” online halls were created, to allow visitors to quickly find the company or the product of interest; in addition, basing our moves on customer feedback, we added subcategories or rearranged existing ones where necessary.

- The “Products” section (previously "Marketplace") has been powered-up with better functionalities.

- There is a significant innovation planned for the last days of the year: a new dedicated server for Expometals.net, 3 times more powerful in terms of hardware and 10 times in terms of bandwidth. You'll notice it after January 3rd, when the transfer of more than 60,000 pages in this new "home" will finally be completed (I take this opportunity to tell you that from December 27th, 2014 to January 3rd, 2015 some minor disruption of services could happen, I apologize in advance).

MARKETING

2014 saw the staff of Expometals participating in numerous exhibitions and events: the notorious wire & Tube Düsseldorf, wire & Tube China, Lamiera and Fornitore Offresi in Italy... Expometals appeared on websites and international journals as EuroWire, Elemento Tubo and many others. From the point of view of the web, we created a new channel for Expometals on the German professional network Xing; we also put a very big effort in boosting the pages Expometals already had on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook, which gave a greater visibility to the companies participating in the portal even on those platforms.

CONTENTS

Dr. Daniela Di Maggio officially became chief editor of the portal, giving a unique imprint to the entire news section, and intervening in the relationships with the cooperating industry associations. Our customers will surely know: this year we worked a lot on the translation and optimization of contents in English, German, Spanish and French, of all advertisers.
There's a new banner campaign, which will be valid for the 12 months ahead. These advertising spaces, purposedly created to strengthen the brand identity of advertisers, will also be available in a wide choice of specific pages of the portal, starting from € 150 per year.

SYNERGIES

Besides being since 2012 the official web partner of ACIMAF (Italian Wire Machinery Manufacturers Association), last year Expometals inaugurated a cooperation project with the main associations of the field, called "Let's connect". This year the project went on, establishing cooperations with CET (Comité Européen de la Tréfilerie), SAWA (South African Wire Association), STEASA (Steel Tube Export Association of South Africa) and UDIB (Union of Italian Fasteners Distributors).
All of these organizations, which are very influential players in the industry, have today an online showcase on Expometals in a new specific category - Associations - to give voice to all their activities.


These are just the most significant improvements we've made to the portal. I purposedly avoided speaking of more technical issues, which were also very numerous.


A few words on the year to come.
2015 will be a decisive year for us. The update of the portal to “Expometals 3.5”, with new, more intuitive graphics, will be released very soon (it's scheduled for early January); plus, we will concentrate our attention on the optimized version for mobile devices, and then head to version 4. But I'll wait before giving you dates and news about this, until the horizon will be in a sharper focus.

Finally I want to thank all the historical and new companies that have chosen Expometals.net to get their businesses worldwide. By listening to their requests, and gradually adapting to the conditions of the web, the markets, the always more suddenly changing world, we were able to get Expometals to grow for almost 13 years now - and on the Internet, this is such a long time.
Again this year a special thank goes to the Foundation Pietro Carsana, which supported us in the identification of new employees; and all the staff of Expometals, especially Fausto and Mariella, who are going through a difficult phase of their lives, but still remain despite everything fundamental pillars for us; plus all the other collaborators for their strive to achieve our objectives, and offer a product of increasingly higher quality.

Last year I wrote: "I would like to ask the politics and institutions to work more seriously, to simplify bureaucratic processes and avoid facade initiatives. Italy still has good ideas and good people, let them emerge.
Now I'd simply like to repeat this statement, again.

Happy Holidays to all and have a wonderful 2015."

Davide Dell'Oro
Managing Director
Expometals.net
[email protected]