About Us

Grimsby Business Portal's aim is to open the gates to better communication among local enterprises and their customers.
We list local businesses, providing them decent Internet Marketing tools. If you are interested in more in-depth tools to promote your business, see the Our Services page for what we offer to improve your corporate identity.
Whom can you find in GBP? Businesses that are local, or reside close by and are more than welcome to travel to Grimsby and serve customers there.
GBP is a subscription based membership portal: yearly subscription in GBP’s first year is $50 CDN. For this price, you get a multiple-page website of your own that is embedded in the Grimsby Business Portal and is accessible from the business directory page. The standard pages of your website are ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, ‘What is Hot’, ‘Map’ (Google map) and ‘Photos’. See the Our Services page for banner advertising opportunities.
Here are the most notable advantages of joining our portal:

1. Your page’s content is fully manageable by you. After your registration, you will be given a username/password within 24 hours. Using these credentials, you will be able to login to the GBP site and access your admin area where you can edit/update content, including photo uploads.
   The standard layout of your page is somewhat customizable at no cost (e.g. changing some colors, buttons, etc.). If you are more ambitious in determining the look of your page, further customization of the pages is possible – one-time cost is $100 CDN.
   Significant changes in page design may exclude certain parts of your page’s information from content management done by you.
   
   
2. You can edit your ‘WhatsHot’ section in your admin area, where updated information will instantly display on the GBP homepage. The list is currently limited to the 10 most recent WhatsHot updates, encouraging you to log in and update your deals frequently. We are not suggesting that you should update your WhatsHot every hour, but it may happen that your deal is pushed out from this list if you update scarcely.
   Should the WhatsHot feature become very popular, then of course we will increase the number of posts displayed on the homepage.
   
   
3. QuickContact! - your search cannot get any faster! If you know the name of the company you look for, or relevant keywords about it's activity and you need its phone #, give a shot to the lightning-fast QuickContact feature. Start typing the name or keyword and companies will appear in the select box as you type. All you have to do is click on the company you want, and its phone number is displayed instantly, without reloading the whole pages content! QuickContact is already a forerunner of the mobile app we are currently developing, but why not take advantage of it's speed on the full website as well? We are aware that QuickContact will really shine when all the records in the database will have their phone # populated - one more reason to subscribe and let your customers find you in the blink of an eye!
   
   
4. GBP offers social networking modules where exchange of information is very easy. Access our forums, blogs and polls, so your voice can and will be heard.
   Currently we assume that we are a community of nice people and we leave most modules very open and public: a casual visitor can create a blog entry and can vote in the poll. Registered and logged in users can create forum topics and forum content – registration is free, posted content is reviewed/approved by the GBP administrator. We were forced to make it this way after the site started to get increasingly more forum spam.
   

What does future have in store?

Very soon, a mobile version of GBP will be launched. It will be a lightweight version of the Grimsby Business Portal, containing the WhatsHot module and the complete business directory. The mobile version will give you the advantage of being able to access the website’s relevant services conveniently from your smart phone.
Moreover, our plan is that all subscription renewal will take place via online payment – an e-commerce module will be developed for your convenience. You will be able to use your Paypal account or any major credit card.

Will the Grimsby Business Portal ever be available in printed form?

GBP is currently an online business directory and as such is not available in hard copy at this moment. But never say never! If there will be an audience requesting a printout, we will certainly arrange that.
Given the portal’s focus on businesses solely, the printed form of the Grimsby Business Portal would likely be a small, preferably pocket format that you can carry with you all the time.