Business Answers Community

If you are a new user, welcome to the Community.

• From here you can access your personal profile, please ensure you update the relevant fields in your profile
  For Service Providers, that’s company name, location, business type and exact business type
  For Experts, that’s company name, job description, area of expertise and ask an expert category
• You can make status updates to let all community users see what your up to, check out the activity stream
• You can search through the member list and make friends and connections, with other community users
• You can send private messages (email) directly to other users in the community
• You can join a group that’s relevant enabling you to share information with the group and receive group updates from other members
• If you are affliated to a blog you will also be able to make blog posts to the world wide web, to help you promote your business services and products. All blog posts are published to search engines and are available via  the search at www.businessanswers.info

If you need any help or support contact Jon Anderson by sending him a message or by mentioning his handle @jonanderson in a status update.

As the regional Business Link service draws to a close on the 25th of November you will notice some changes with the community site.

Firstly change from Business Link branding to Business Aswers branding.

Secondly the arrangement of blog sites will be changing to represent the contracts Peninsula Enteprise deliver such as   RURAL FOCUS, UTKI, Export Cornwall, IYRE

Finally we are opening the community site to partners, this was always on the agenda for the community site and we are really excited to see the first of our partners, the members of the Exeter and Heart of Devon Skills Board joining the community from Monday the 21st November.

To celebrate we will be creating a new skills and learning blog that they can contribute to and share their information and promotions with the world wide web and a members only group for internal communications for all members.

Look out for new members and remember to say hello

The aim of The Community is to encourage collaboration and engagement around a number of business related issues.

By visiting the Blogs tab, a number of blog sites can be visited, these include Export Cornwall, Business Advise, RURAL FOCUS, Skills and more

Employees and Partners of Peninsula Enterprise contribute the content within these blogs and are users of the site.  Views, comments and questions can be made by anyone.

Peninsula Enterprise is committed to supporting the economic and social development of the South West. Based in the heart of region we work in partnership with the public and private sectors to develop solutions and deliver services that inspire change and drive growth.a leader

We specifically hope that businesses operating in the South West gain value from these posts.

If you would like to get involved please contact us by email

Finally, please help to make The Community a vibrant place.
You have the skills and knowledge – please share them.

The new business link regional website, www.businesslinkanswers.co.uk is in “live” Beta testing.

Beta testing is a critical phase of developing an successful site or application because it provides a last chance to find and fix problems. We are Beta testing in a live environment due to the complexities of the site and the size of our organisation. However we plan to use the Beta test stage  after completing our testing to use exclusivity to drive desire with clients and partners over the first few months before the site gets submitted to search engines.

The Beta testing program will begin on Thursday the 24^th June, with a wider usability testing programme beginning the week after.

When writing your post please remember to create an exceprt.

This is crucial as the business link answers website will display your excerpt up on the social media feed box under recent posts on our home page.

Need to know more about Excerpts? read the WordPress Codex on Excerpts

Welcome to the Business Link Community site. The purpose of this site is to encourage collaboration and engagement around a number of important business issues.

At present the site is in a Beta testing phase, which means that changes may still be made to its functionality and design.

The menu tab near the top right of the page is particularly useful for navigating the site. Activity shows all the recent activity by all users. Members allows a list to be shown of all users, whilst Groups shows which users fall within different business areas. Blogs is the best place to look for content that may be interesting to you and this is where our content is categorised.

If you are reading this, please help to make the Community a vibrant place. Write a blog, comment on content, speak to other users. You have the skills and knowledge – please share them.

There are lots of new and improved features in this release of Buddy Press.

Probably the biggest change for users is the change from “Wire Posts” and “Status Updates” to “Activity Streams”

Activity Streams
Activity streams form the focus of the new default theme and provide a really easy and intuitive way for users to interact.

Each activity item now has a permalink so it’s easy to bookmark or send direct links to any type of activity.

Any user can also comment on activity across a site, with support for threading so your users can ignite their own individual discussions around a single activity.

There’s also direct update posting to the activity stream, so it’s easy to share your thoughts globally, or even within a particular group. Not only that, you can also mark activity items as a favourite, and send other users @username mentions.

Other features are;

Standard Word Press Support
Buddy Press now works on all Word Press installations not just WordPress MU, this means that BP will be accessible by more users.

Simple Installation
Buddy Press is now very easy to install, previous versions required some manual installation steps, and this also means the Buddy Press community will grow

New default themes
There is now a much more attractive and usable standard theme which is easy to extend
With  over 15,000 Buddy Press users registered on the buddy press site who are all interested in testing and discussing the newest features of Buddy Press.

Please have a play and let me know what you think.
Jon