Bizwiki, the UK’s popular free business listing website, today announced that they have enhanced their coverage of British businesses with the addition of ‘PowerListings’ supplied by Yext, the global leader in Digital Location Management.

“Since its launch in 2007, Bizwiki has been dedicated to giving the public free access to detailed, useful information about businesses all over the United Kingdom, and we are pleased to be able to announce that this coverage will now be enhanced with additional information provided by Yext,” said director Matt Aird. “As a wiki-style site for companies, Bizwiki is changing the way online business information works by combining user-edited records and crowd-sourced detail with the power of advanced web-spiders and structured data.”

Bizwiki currently lists information for well over one million British businesses, organisations, charities and companies, all of which is made available for public access free of charge. This information includes vital contact details, website links, email addresses, location maps, messages from representatives of the companies themselves, links to associations and more.

“We currently provide information about a very wide range of British businesses, and this partnership with Yext will both increase the number of businesses in our directory and allow us to significantly expand the amount of rich content and level of detail displayed,”  continued Matt Aird. “This includes features like image galleries, embedded videos and special offers provided directly by the business owners or managers.  We believe this will be valuable to our site’s users, and be another step towards our goal of providing useful, high quality and comprehensive information about businesses in every area of the country.”

Bizwiki.com site has been relaunched with an entirely new look and feel.

For the last few months we have been working on incorporating greatly expanded and enhanced content. This new version of the site incorporates a number of new features and improvements that we’ve already tried on Bizwiki’s sister site Bizwiki.co.uk, and we are excited to get them pushed out in the States as well.

We expect our regular users to enjoy the new streamlined front-end and enhanced design, but the site’s upgrades are much more than skin-deep. The new site runs faster, gives quicker access to information, has improved search and display, and will provide a better overall user experience.

The new layout was designed from the ground up to offer intuitive navigation with a high degree of user-friendliness. We now feature over ten million US businesses, companies, charities, organizations and non-profits on the site, so the priority was to streamline the interface and ensure the site’s users can find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.

The new Bizwiki.com website has broadened the content available to users to include enhanced information about over a million new businesses. Information about companies includes user-edited content, maps and directions, vital contact and address information, messages from the individual companies, relevant text from websites, important links, competitor links and online contact details, all provided free of charge to the site’s visitors in a new streamlined front-end design.

“We worked hard to keep our visitors in mind at every step of the rebuild,” said Matt Aird. “A lot of the credit for the quality of the finish product goes to the site’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, and lead developer Sruthi Krishna, who worked tirelessly to complete this project.”

Have a look around and let us know what you think!

The Bizwiki.co.uk site has been relaunched with an entirely new look and feel.

Demonstrating the new site, company director, Matt Aird, said, “We expect our regular users to enjoy the new streamlined front-end design, but the upgrades that have been made to the site are much more than skin-deep. For the last few months we have been working on incorporating greatly expanded and enhanced content. We believe the new site is both smarter and faster, and will provide a better overall user experience.

“The new layout was designed from the ground up to offer intuitive navigation with a high degree of user-friendliness. We now feature almost two million British businesses on the site, so the priority was to streamline the interface and ensure the site’s users can find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.”

The new Bizwiki.co.uk website has broadened the content available to users to include enhanced information about hundreds of thousands of new businesses. Information about companies includes user-edited content, maps and directions, vital contact and address information, messages from the individual companies, text from company’s websites, important links, competitor links and online contact details, all provided free of charge to the site’s visitors in a new streamlined front-end design.

“Visualising each section of the site with our visitors in mind and working to offer them a fresh, appealing design with clear access to the information they are seeking were key goals of the relaunch,” says Matt Aird. “It is a credit to the site’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, and our lead developer, Sruthi Krishna, that even with the site having grown in both size and breadth of information, visitors can receive relevant information quickly and clearly with as few clicks as possible.”

Go to Bizwiki.co.uk to check it out.

Byte Night UK is less than 2 weeks away and the main chief technical architect behind Bizwiki, Keith Hinde, is taking up the challenge to sleep rough in order to help raise awareness and funds to tackle youth homelessness and give at risk teenagers help and security.

Youth Homelessness Statistics

Although official local council figures are lower (England: 15,000 homeless youth in 2013 / Scotland: 12,000 homeless youth in 2011/12), according to Action for Children many homeless youths do not register, and an estimated 80,000 young people a year experience homelessness in the UK – leaving them vulnerable to violence, mental health problems and addiction. Byte Night raises money for Action for Children services that work with young people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.

Why Sleep Rough

In his own words, Keith tells us why he’s willing to brave a chilly October night out in the open:

“Byte Night” has been a fund-raising event I’ve wanted to be involved with for some time and I’m very pleased to be taking part this year. It has always seemed a great event to both help some of the UK’s most vulnerable young people and help get the mission of Action for Children out there to a wider audience.

Growing up I feel I was very fortunate: a loving home and stable family. I never had to worry about violence at home, abuse of any kind, poverty, where I would sleep or indeed where my next meal would come from – these things I could (and did) take for granted. Thousands of young people in the UK are not so fortunate: they find themselves in desperate need and awful situations, often out on the street at one of most crucial times of their lives.

For almost 150 years Action for Children have made it their mission to help these young people in any way they can. My night sleeping out is nothing compared to the hardships they suffer, but I hope the efforts of everyone sleeping out on the 3rd October can go some way to help Action for Children in their mission.”

What is Byte Night

Byte Night started 16 years ago when 30 individuals from the IT industry slept out and raised £35,000. Byte Night is now the leading charity event for individuals and teams from the IT, technology and business sectors and the UK’s largest charity sleep out with more than 1400 sleepers who in 2013 raised over £1 million.

This year Byte Night will take place in 8 locations around the UK on Friday October 3rd and Keith will be one of them.

Get Involved

If you want to help Keith raise funds for this incredibly important cause you can donate to his JustGiving page here.

To find out more about the Byte Night event,  what it’s in aide of and how you can also get involved, have a look at the Byte Night website and Facebook page, or watch this video of Holly, a teenage girl that Action for Children was able to help get off the streets thanks to the support of caring individuals like Keith and you.

We are happy to be able to announce that a new version of the maps we display for each business, company and organisation on the site has been completed and went live earlier today.

The new maps leverage the power of google-maps to display each location in a clearer way, with a shorter loading time. In response to the way we found many visitors were using the site, we’ve also changed the way the site works slightly so that users who click to ‘See a larger map’ now go directly to a page designed for printing. These pages display just the vital contact information about the company underneath a good-sized map that can be adjusted by the user or immediately printed.

We hope that the businesses on Bizwiki and the tens of thousands of people who use the site every day find these changes useful. The new system has been thoroughly tested, but as always any errors or location discrepancies can be reported here. http://www.bizwiki.co.uk/contact.htm

Thanks, and we hope you continue to find Bizwiki useful.

Since its launch in 2007, Bizwiki has been considered an important place for local businesses to be listed. This is not only for the traffic Bizwiki can drive to a business but also because Bizwiki provides business information to the ever popular Accessplace.com as well as several other local UK directories like TownPages.com and BritishServices.co.uk.

On yesterday’s Top UK Citation Sources for local businesses compiled by Smart Local, (click here) Bizwiki, Accessplace and TownPages.com take 3 of the top 30 slots.

We are of course grateful to the author of the list and honoured to be included, especially since it means we are keeping our place in the “top citation sources” lists for a fourth consecutive year.

In 2012 Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGS Marketing reviewed a number of published “top citation source” lists and assigned points to the sites based on how many times each was mentioned. Bizwiki.co.uk was ranked number 6 out of more than 30 UK local business sites. 

In 2011 Bizwiki was featured as an “extra-important” site on LocalVisibilitySystems’ Top UK Local Business Directories list.

In the same year both Bizwiki.co.uk and Accessplace.com appeared on Bright Local’s Top 50 UK Citation Sources list.

And in 2010, Mike Blumenthal featured a guest post by Myles Anderson which jointly listed both Bizwiki.co.uk and Accessplace.com as number 8 in the Top 10 UK online business directories.

Both sites also appeared on Cylex UK’s 2010 list of 28 Online Business Directories.

We are happy to have received these commendations, and more importantly hope that our users continue to find Bizwiki to be a useful resource when searching for any local companies, business and charities.

The report an error form hasn’t been working for the last few days which meant that you couldn’t submit an udpate request. It is now fixed so please feel free to submit from the Report an Error link that is on every company listing page on both Bizwiki and the sites that use Bizwiki’s data.

Please do not submit update requests from the contact form or via email. We can only action update requests that are sent using the Report an Error form.

Thank you.

In an effort to streamline the editing of records on Bizwiki and ensure that vital changes are actioned and go through to the live site fast, we are making some major changes to how records are submitted and reviewed.

The “Add / Edit a Record” functionality will soon be consolidated into the ‘Report an Error’ feature. This has the benefit to users of not requiring them to register for an account and log in to be able to request a fix or report an error with an existing business record, and will streamline the processing of records by editors by having only the important fixes come through to them.

We have had a great deal of success in adding and compiling business records using our fine-tuned Bizwiki Bot Spider, and new company records will be added to the site periodically at regular intervals. We will also be adding additional depth to existing records using the same technology, with human editors getting involved where required.

The result of this should be fewer features immediately available to users to add and edit records on the site, but a faster response rate to any required fixes and edits to existing records. We also anticipate the process of requesting important changes both being made easier for visitors, who will now be able to do so without any registration being required, and a reduced workload on our editors who put so much effort in to staying on top of it all.

This is a step in the evolution of the Bizwiki project, so while some users may miss some of the functionality that is being retired we hope that you will enjoy the faster response times, periodic automatic updates, and continue to use and benefit from the site.

We are happy to be able to announce that the Bizwiki project passed another milestone at the end of last week, when our 150,000th Editor registered on Bizwiki.co.uk.

This means that there are now over 150,000 people who have signed up to Bizwiki to help edit, add, correct and improve business information on the site.

Millions of people access and use the information on Bizwiki and the other sites it powers every month, so this is a great time to say thanks to the many users who are helping make this site the useful resource that it is. In a testament to the power of collaboration, we are seeing more improvements every day to the width of coverage of the business community but also to the depth of information about the individual companies that compose it.

The Bizwiki site is built around a self-organised and collaborative community that any of our users are invited to join. Rather than the usual experience of just reading what a website has to say, everyone is invited to actively participate. Users can help produce for themselves the best and most comprehensive index of businesses on the web, or the most detailed index of companies in their town or even street.

If you’d like to join in, add a company or update any of the information on the site, just click the Create Account link to become a Bizwiki Editor.

The latest version of Bizwiki has just gone live –and it’s a record breaker!

This new update to the site was a colossal undertaking, combining updates submitted by many of the site’s users and manual changes made by the editorial team over the last few months with a huge update across all categories of business using the Bizwikibot spider. The result is not just more up-to-date company records, but a greater depth and breadth of business information is now available to our site’s users than ever.

A grand total of 4,936,758 existing businesses on Bizwiki have had their information edited and updated. This includes manually added content, address changes, telephone and contact detail updates and map location changes.

A remarkable 5,068,071 new businesses have been added to Bizwiki, in many cases completely with in-depth information. This means that the site is now larger and covers the country more comprehensively than ever.

1,367,582 of the old businesses on the site have been marked as obsolete and deleted. This includes businesses that have closed down over during the last couple of tumultuous years, but also companies that have transformed, been renamed or relaunched in new business categories.

There have been a number of dedicated people involved in these updates, changes and the reorganisation over the last six months, but the lion’s share of the credit has to go to our Chief Technical Architect Keith Hinde, who has really pulled out all the stops to make this happen.

And of course, we’d like to say a special thank you to all the many visitors who have helped by adding, editing and increasing the amount of useful information on the site. That especially applies to business owners and representatives who have pitched in to help improve the online profile of their own companies – nobody knows your business better than you, and on the behalf of the Bizwiki team I’d like to thank you for sharing your knowledge with all our site’s users.

Thanks!