What is urbanants?

Urbanants is a website for Stroud and the surrounding area that's free to use. It's a place for you to find local businesses and services, share your views and experiences of them, and talk about local issues.

Everyone can find listings and read reviews, but once you've registered you can also use urbanants to:

• List a business - your own or one you used and thought was great or terrible
• Tell everybody what's going on locally from news to events and gossip
• Buy, sell and swap things via our free classifieds section
• Discuss local issues that get your goat from where to buy the best coffee in town to threatened cuts in public services
• Keep in touch with friends or make new ones by using our chatroom or your own urbanants email address.
• Phone listed businesses for free using our integrated VoIP system

With our mapping facility you can tell the world what happened where and when - who you saw across that crowded bar, the route of your favourite local walk, the state of the latest roadworks - we don't mind what so long as it's legal and fulfils our terms of use. And if you have new content ideas please let us know. Whatever you do, we hope you enjoy being an urban ant.

Why have you set up urbanants?

Have you ever tried looking for local services in newspaper classifieds, phone directories or via internet search engines? It's impossible to distinguish between the mass of adverts you're faced with. And how do you find the services that don't advertise? Guide books can't cover everything and soon become out of date. For that matter, how many guide books even cover towns like Stroud and its surrounding villages properly?

Urbanants was born out of frustration with the quality of information available at local level, not only in Stroud but more widely, particularly with trying to find reliable and reputable tradespeople and professionals. Friends and neighbours can sometimes help but we wanted to make that circle bigger and find a way for local businesses to benefit too..

Urbanants is a community of individuals who are willing to share their knowledge to help each other and visitors too. Use the site to find the yummiest places to eat, the gentlest dentist and the least patronising plumber - all reviewed and rated by other ants. Together we might also be able to raise the standard of services locally, hold our public servants to greater account and expose dodgy firms and practices.

How is it funded?

Urbanants is a self-funded start-up. Basic listings are free while our enhanced listings provide businesses with greater exposure and features without compromising the site's community feel. If services truly want to distinguish themselves they will need positive reviews from our users.

If the website is a success, we will donate a proportion of the profits to local charities chosen by our registered users. That success will depend on our users so if you like the site tell your friends and relatives and if you don't tell us how we could improve it.

Who's behind urbanants?

We are two local guys who happen to have had the time, inclination and skills to set this thing up.

Simon Bernstein, Managing Director

“My expertise is in marketing, specifically for charities and pressure groups which I've been doing for the last 16 years. Up until 2002 I was Director of Communications and Fundraising for Friends of the Earth. I've lived in Stroud since then helping national and local charities as a freelance consultant.”

Christian Dannemann, Technical Director

“I've been involved in putting together interactive web sites since around 1995 (yes, that was using the first cern web server and doing the scripting on the fly - all on an IBM AIX machine). I've been running a software company since 2001 that is sponsoring parts of the start-up of urbanants. I've always enjoyed the technical side of it and have written all the code for the site myself (it's php with a postgresql cluster as the database) as well as the various bits around it (asterisk telephone server, etc).”

Why should I register as a user?

If you register you will be able to write reviews, list services, promote events, add news stories, use our classified section and chat to your friends. If you provide a verifiable phone number you'll also be able to make calls to local businesses free of charge if they're listed on our site.

To provide you with all these functions we ask you to give us your name, address, email and phone number. We will not use these for any purpose other than urbanants information and will always operate within the Data Protection Act. We ask for this information to ensure that reviews and information are posted by genuine individuals.

Your personal details will not be visible to other users and you can make up your own user name if you'd prefer not to use your real one. If you want, you can say a bit about who you are and provide a photo of yourself. This helps show that real people are writing the reviews.

We trust you to use urbanants responsibly as well as have fun. Please trust us with your personal details so that the site works in the way we intend.

Why should I list a business or service?

We want to give local businesses a chance to compete more effectively with the big guys by providing them with a free presence on the web to showcase what they offer. Our website is optimised for all the main internet search engines which means your urbanants listing will rank highly on search results for sites like Google. Businesses, public services, individuals and organisations of any description can promote what they do through our special infopages. From accountants to artists, builders to beauty salons, cafes to couriers, dentists to dressmakers, entertainers to Zen Buddhism classes, feel free to list a service.

Our basic listing is free and provides a lot more than most online and printed directories. Anyone can list a business or service; you just need to be registered as a user. What's more, if you run a local business, you can encourage your customers to write reviews and rate their experiences of your service to help you gain new business. Find out more about our enhanced listings for businesses here. We don't believe in tying you in to long-term contracts or upfront annual fees; just in giving you a host of features you won't find elsewhere.

urbanants

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