WREDO was paying much
less for maintenance of its main Melbourne West site (www.melbwest.com.au) compared to
the cost of the Bizewest portal (www.bizewest.com.au), and it would seem that this excessive
cost ultimately precipitated the collapse of Bizewest in its original form. Despite its
final demise, however, the emergence and development of the Bizewest portal left a legacy
of useful benefits, and its development costs were certainly not wasted. As a postscript to
the demise of the Bizewest portal, WREDO itself, unfortunately, also ceased operations in
January, 2005, and closed down due to lack of ongoing funds to fulfil its mission.
Regional portals add the benefit of community participation to the list of portal strengths.
This is very important to many small businesses. There is, however, another side to portal
implementation, especially for those portals initially supported by government funding, for
Tatnall & Pl ask n
Copyright ?© 2007, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission
of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
at some stage their operations have to become self-funding. This means that participating
small businesses should be aware that a potential sting in the tail involving increased costs
of participation may be just around the corner (Burgess, Tatnall, & Pliaskin 2005).
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