Graham writes.....It was good to see the Newcastle Journal printing a massive feature about a real North East success story in Darlington. Recognition has been promoting shopsafe.co.uk for a while now and its success is really impressive.

www.shopsafe.co.uk, the North-East based online shopping directory has continued to grow with a 16% increase in page views by visitors in its tenth year.Having received 1,673,989 page views in January 2010, www.shopsafe.co.uk has vastly outgrown its modest start when it received 32,950 page views ten years earlier.During the same time, the number of monthly visitors has grown from little more than 9,400 to in excess of 304,900.Now, around 10,000 visitors a day use www.shopsafe.co.uk to access 4,000 retailers, including the likes of Hamleys, Next, Amazon, Marks & Spencer and Nike. Each site has been checked for security and ease of use before being accepted onto the directory.The directory was launched only a year after Google and web giants such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were not to appear until years later. The likes of Boo and Clickmango, big names in their day, were among countless victims of the dot com crash of March 2000.However, the key to www.shopsafe.co.uk’s success has been offering a service which continues to provide visitors with what they want – a reassuringly safe online shopping environment.