Late last year, local businessman Chris Malan launched an online directory for business in Maitland called Maitland Business Guide.

It's a free for Maitland businesses to create their directory listing, providing users access to statistics on page hits and click throughs.

Chris says that the guide has already proven successful with the website returning on the first page in Google for searches related to business guides/directories in Maitland.

“Maitland Business Guide provides free exposure to all businesses servicing the greater Maitland area as well as unparalleled flexibility for businesses with entries on the site and a rich set of statistics so owners can see how their entry performed between any two dates,” Chris said.

Chris wrote the code via a Grails web application and the majority of the code is in the programming language Groovy, which is based on Java.

Visitors to the site are able to search for any organisation name, business type or category.