BT Tradespace: Building an Online Community Platform for Small Businesses

About BT and BT Tradespace

BT is one of the world's leading communications services companies, serving customers in the UK and in more than 180 countries. Its main businesses include fixed-line services, broadband, mobile and TV, along with networked IT services.

BT Tradespace was BT's online community for small and medium-sized businesses. After a beta that started in February 2007, BT launched it in April 2007. It combined a business directory and marketplace with social tools, so a business could set up a web presence from templates, publish blogs, photos, videos and podcasts, and join communities organized by industry and location. Later in 2007, BT and PayPal teamed up so businesses on Tradespace could buy and sell goods.

The challenge: helping small businesses get found online

For most small businesses at the time, promoting themselves online was hard. Building a website took skills or money they did not have, and a listing in a business directory said little about who they really were. Tradespace set out to fix that: a place where a business could show what it does, build relationships and turn the internet into a sales channel.

It also mattered to BT. Tradespace gave BT a forum to build brand loyalty with the businesses it serves and to promote its own offers in a way that did not get in the way of the community.

What we did on BT Tradespace

We did development work on BT Tradespace, which was built on DotNetNuke, the content management and portal platform built on Microsoft ASP.NET. By the time we wrote up the project, Tradespace was a thriving community with more than 360,000 members and still growing.

As we put it then, relationships shape almost every part of our lives, personal and professional, and BT Tradespace changed the way small businesses found and grew those relationships.

What it takes to build an online community platform

A business community lives or dies on two things: how easy it is to join and take part, and whether members find each other useful. That means simple tools to create a profile or page, good search and categories so the right people meet, content that members want to share, and a platform that keeps up as the community grows into the hundreds of thousands.

We bring that same thinking to web app development, backend development and UI/UX design for communities, directories and marketplaces today.

Our DotNetNuke and telecom experience

BT Tradespace was one of our DotNetNuke projects for large telecom companies. For AT&T Government Solutions, we moved a set of custom intranet applications into a single DotNetNuke portal. Our founder wrote the Wrox Press book Done in 60 Minutes: Building a Custom DotNetNuke Membership Provider. See our software engineering for telecom page for more.

Still running an older community or portal platform? Our legacy modernization and .NET modernization work moves it forward without losing your members or content. To add engineers to your own team, you can hire full stack developers or hire .NET developers through Maxiom.dev.