GoWEB has decided to cut some of its services. GoWEB Directory and GoWEB Kids have been discontinued until further notice. GoWEB Anthems has also been discontinued and ePress News and GoWEB Social  hang in the balance. These cuts weren’t easy to make, especially GoWEB Kids, but we are committed to offering you the highest possible standard and we simply don’t have the immediate man-power to maintain these services with good quality. Ideally, we would like these services to be updated as frequently as our Portal homepage, but until we can commit to that, we have discontinued them.

However, that doesn’t mean you will lose all the functionality of those sites. We’ve integrated the themes from the discontinued sites into the homepage, so Portal users now have 13 themes to choose from. We think that’s great news. Also, some of the features from the GoWEB Kids page have been integrated into the GoWEB Games, which is still alive and kicking. We’ve also made improvements to the “Help” features offered on the homepage so you don’t have to open the full Help Center. We are currently looking at what we can do to integrate more Help features without cluttering the page, of course.  In the upcoming weeks, we will be seeking to integrate some of the functionality from GoWEB directory into the homepage as well.

We want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who support our services. We will try to bring back these services(or all-new ones) as soon as we realistically can. We are already in talks about have people run some of them, but more on that when and if that time comes.

As we enter a new year in a world of ever changing technology, GoWEB has made some code changes  to reflect the age.

• We’ve made the search box bigger
• Features are now loaded with AJAX technology
• The News section is now loaded with AJAX technology
• The Sports section is now loaded with AJAX technology
• Fixed a number of display bugs for Internet Explorer users

AJAX is a technology which allows you to amend the current page with more  data. The method we were using before loaded another page  inside the homepage, which was more overhead and did not update fast enough. Tis change was in the pipeline from last year, but it was not a simple task. We had to make sure the code in the sections to be imported into the homepage, was compatible with the code in the homepage itself. However, after an in-house beta trial, the new homepage is finally live.

Speaking of betas, we usually run a beta homepage alongside our regular homepage, where we  test out new code.  The latest code changes were so fundamental that we couldn’t run the  beta side by side with the public homepage. We had to revive the beta sub-domain (gowebnow.net/beta) to run the trial separately. We are going to leave this sub-domain open as the new beta channel, which you can check  for more code changes this year. As always we are looking at new features  which might  be beneficial to you. We will inform you when new features appear in the beta channel.

As we do some electronic “stock taking”, we’ve decided to publish some statistics for the month of September 2009.

These are the places people go to directly

The majority of users finding GoWEB in the Search Engines were searching for Minibuses or Bajan Words.

Most of our users are using these browsers. For best viewing, we recommend Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox

Most of our users were usig these screen resolutions. For best viewing we recommend 1024 x 768 or higher.

We want to thank all of our users and assure you that in addition to your feedback, we will be evaluating these statistics to see how we can better serve you. It is clear that the Bajan Dictionary and the Minibus Guide are our most popular services after the homepage. We have also been receiving some requests for additions to both services. You can therefore look forward to seeing additions and improvements to these services in the very near future.

Mario Herbert – GoWEB Administrator

Many people like applying themes to their desktop, but in the last decade, themes have come a very long way. More types of programs are coming with themes, and even webpages can be themed now. When you different theme-aware products and services, you an get a very pleasing and consistent overall user experience. Today, we’ll just give you some tips on how to mix themes on the web for a better browsing experience.

Let’s start with the program we use to gt on the web, the web browser. For this exercise we’ve chosen the Google Chrome web browser, which allows theming of just bout every element of the browser. We’re going to use the Yulia Brodskaya theme.

Next, we’re going to give our homepage a theme to match. Not all webpages support themes, but we’re using GoWEB Now as our homepage (of course) which comes with a number of themes for your personal taste. We’re going to use the Marble theme on our GoWEB homepage, which should blend nicely with the themes used on the browser.

After the homepage, the Email Inbox is probably one of the most used pages in our browser. If you have a theme-aware Email service, you can ad that into the theming mix as well. For this, we re going to use Gmail, which in our opinion is the most customizable email service when it comes to themes, (this also works with GoWEB Mail). We’re going to use the Turf theme for Gmail.

And there you have it. We’ve themed our browser, our homepage and our email inbox to match each other. What other services do you use which can be themed?

Get Google Chrome here

Get Google Chrome Themes here

Learn about GoWEB Now here

Learn about GoWEB Themes here

Learn how to make GoWEB your homepage here