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!

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.

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!

Work is underway on a huge update of business records across the site.

This is a giant project involving changes and additions across hundreds of categories of business and hundreds of thousands of companies, and involves manually submitted entries added by our users and editors, updates from databases and detailed information gathered by our BizwikiBot spider.

We expect to have the new version rolled out across the site soon, and hope that it will help Bizwiki be an ever more useful resource for our many visitors and users.

Watch this space for more information!

We are pleased to announce a huge update of Bizwiki UK’s index of companies and information has been completed. Consisting of tens of thousands of user-edited records and new additions that have been hand-processed by our editorial team and more than quarter of a million records being updated or having additional information added to them by our BizwikBot spider, this is a major update and should result in even better depth of information across the site.

There is now the grand total of 1,412,330 businesses in the Bizwiki UK database, and thanks to the submissions our registered users and visitors are making this is a number that continues to grow.

A large part of the credit for the quality and depth of information in this update goes to Bizwiki’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, who has been slaving away on this piece of work for more than half a year. On behalf of the site’s editors and users, thanks for your tireless efforts!

Thanks also to the  many users and editors who have continued to add high-quality and detailed information about the companies they know, helping make Bizwiki a useful and popular business resource for all our visitors.

Ever seen an old, outdated book? The pages are yellow, crackling, and faded. They’re sometimes cherished, perhaps even immortalised in some library where people can gasp in wonder at all that it represents. But no-one turns its pages, except perhaps some specialist bibliophile. And those are the lucky books; the rest become landfill, or unvisited – even embarrassing – monuments to dead trees.

Such is the fate of the traditional yellow page directory. Why? In an age of online directories, print directories are like clay tablets: large, cumbersome, limited, and unwieldy.

Even then, the comparison can’t emphasise just how obsolete they’ve become, all over the world. If you’re a business owner, you normally can’t get your details printed in them without paying a regular fee. You can’t easily edit the information without calling up the publisher. And even if you get your details in there, that’s it: you’re in a single publisher’s directory, viewable only to people who get the printed brick dropped outside their door. And what if there’s a mistake in the book, or your details change? No fixes will be forthcoming until the next print run.

Compare that with something like Bizwiki, for example: anyone can submit their business details to it, covering a wide range of information – information about your company, your email addresses, website addresses, and phone numbers – far beyond the traditional few words you’re limited to in print. Anyone can edit the business information as well, which makes it exceptionally easy to keep the information up-to-date and current. Best of all, it’s completely free. There’s no pushy sales people to deal with trying to sell you extras; it’s completely in your control, and that’s the way it should be.

On top of that, anyone using a search engine like Google looking for “Plumbers in Aldershot” or “Attorneys in Austin, Texas” is a potential customer. (Not to mention that, depending on your business, your potential customers could now be located anywhere in the UK, US or even the whole world, instead of being limited to a particular geographic location). Plus, if you add your details to Bizwiki UK, for example, you’ll appear in other directories on-line, like AccessPlace.com, increasing your exposure.

Then, consider the user, or customer, who wants to find a business. Printed directories have one method of organisation: dumping everything into categories, and organising them alphabetically. You can’t search by postcode, zip code, state, town or city. You can’t search for a particular business name. In short, with on-line directories, the customer is not limited to one particular method of finding business information.

Then, there’s the issue of portability. Mobile phone usage across the world has sky-rocketed. If you’re on the train, and want to find a nearby restaurant, tome-like yellow page monstrosities can’t sit there conveniently in your back-pocket.

Realistically, the only thing yellow-page style printed directories are destined for is the recycling bin. Alternatively, you could have a bit of fun and collect them from your neighbours, dump them on the doorstep of the publisher, and get scolded for creating a fire hazard. But, the point is, we simply don’t use them anymore, because they’ve been superseded by a new medium that is more current, accurate, and easy to use, for both business owners and customers. Plus, digital content isn’t made of dead trees, and that can only be a good thing.

The brand new version of Bizwiki.co.uk went live yesterday at lunchtime. Apart from being shinier, faster and easier to use than ever before, there is one change that will be instantly noticeable and that brings it in line with the US Bizwiki.com:

Bizwiki.co.uk is now review-free

This may seem to be bucking the trend for websites, with every second site on the web now offering review functionality, but we took the view that we would rather focus our efforts on what Bizwiki does best: building up a unique directory of detailed information about companies and businesses that any user can help improve and enlarge.

Bizwiki has always been dedicated to information over opinion, so it was on request from users that we rolled out a review feature for our UK site at a time where there were less alternatives. Apart from the useful information reviews provide, our goal was to ensure that opinions had their own space on the site and were less likely to be added to information sections.

Over the last few years we have seen the site and its users develop and change, and now an increasing proportion of registered Editors are representatives, owners or managers of businesses and companies. The quality of information has been consistently improving and we’ve been very happy to see the user base grow along with it.

We launched the US version of Bizwiki.com without reviews, and found that this has been nothing but beneficial in clarifying the purpose of this as the wiki for business, and distinguishing Bizwiki from sentiment-orientated sites like Yelp and Angieslist.

We are confident that this improved focus will give our users more of what they want, and enable our editors and staff to concentrate on increasing both the breadth of the site and the depth of information available about each record.

Finally I’d like to thank our Lead Developer Craig Sefton and Chief Technical Architect Keith Hinde for their tireless efforts to rebuild the site and get this new and highly improved version live.

Enjoy the new Bizwiki!

A note to businesses:

During the time that reviews were featured on Bizwiki.co.uk some companies accumulated a number of reviews from the public that they may want to retain. If so, don’t worry, nothing has been deleted. The reviews are not being displayed on this site, but are still available on request if you would like to get a copy of them for use on your own website or in your advertising material.

Email us at team@bizwiki.co.uk before the end of 2010 with the name of the company and we will send you a text copy of the reviews received free of charge.

Thanks.

We are pleased to be able to announce that Bizwiki.com now powers the business listings on the Allonesearch.com local search website.

You can now find information provided directly from Bizwiki powering Allonesearch’s search functionality and appearing on many of the business directory pages.

What this exciting development means to our visitors is that by adding your business or increasing the amount of information available about it on Bizwiki, you will get exposure not only to out community of users on this site but also to people using Allonesearch for local information and yellow page look-ups.

If you would like to get a new company added to both Bizwiki and Allonesearch.com it’s now easier than ever, just click to add it right here.

And the best part is that it’s completely free to do so. That’s the wiki difference.