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BIG Wales is a non-profit making website maintained by IT Wales Staff at the University of Wales Swansea. It grew out of the successful SWIG project, and continues to support businesses in Wales by giving them access to the best business information on the web.
With the initial sponsorship of Business Eye and the Wales Tourist Board, and with the ongoing support of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) we are now creating a resource which aims to meet the information needs of the business community in Wales.
2. To allow users to move from first step information direct to the best advisors in Wales for their business needs.
3. To give SME's an information tool and access to technology to help embrace the power of the Internet and e-commerce.
4. To ensure that as much Welsh local content as possible is made available to users.
5. To develop partnerships across Wales in the information world, advisers and business to make the site as all inclusive as possible.
Some of these links will lead on to extended paid for services but this is up to the individual user to use or not.
We do not provide content as such but link to the existing content that is already out there on the web. We do this by trying to link to the precise pages that contain the information and not by leaving users at the door of a huge website to fend for themselves.
These sources are monitored and evaluated by information professionals to ensure quality of information, currency and relevance.
We also use software to monitor which sites are being used to gauge their value.
In addition we hope our feedback feature will prove successful in providing dialogue with our customers and more websites from the business and information community.
For this reason, we do not have frames or flash or ask users to register.
This is also why we take a simple directory approach to feeding users the information they need. This has proved the most effective with business people who need information quickly and have very little time to spend searching the web.
Maintenance will be carried out on a daily basis and no information source will be more than a maximum of 3 clicks away, most will be 2 clicks away.
A breadcrumb trail will always show a user where he or she is and how he or she got there. The internal search engine allows for searches within the site so the user always gets relevant hits.
Information is set up in 3 easy menus:
Small business ... for basic advice for any aspect of starting or growing a business.
Essentials ... for basic instant business facts such as directories, phonebooks, maps.
Digging Deeper ... for more in depth research on topics of interest.
A main contact directory for Wales for all business support advice and information.