We brought the new GoWEB portal online at the end of 2008, and posted the official announcement on this blog in early January 2009. The feedback has been all good on this new version, and it’s been a few months since we’ve rolled out any major upgrades or new features.

We are therefore very pleased to announce a number of new features and upgrades, just in time for the beginning of March.

Customize My GoWEB

If you look at the bar to the top of your homepage, you will notice some new links there. One of these links says “Customize”. This new feature gives users a single interface to customize the look and feel of all customizable sections of our site.

With this release, you can choose themes for your homepage, the Kidz portal and the Web Directory in a single step-by-step process. Check it out.

Page Tour

Also new, is the “Take Page Tour” link. This is an interactive tour of key GoWEB pages, including the homepage,  the Kidz portal and the Weather Channel. Learn the features available on our site with this interactive tool.

GoWEB Lite

GoWEB now has an alternative homepage, which is “lighter” than the standard. The “Lite” page provides you mainly with a search box. You’ll still be able to search the Caribbean, weather and all the other extra search options on the main portal, but you won’t have any content at your fingertips.

The Lite page doesn’t carry news headlines, video player, featured articles or the links to email and social network services.  The two pages are meant to be used interchangably, allowing you to have just a search box, when that’s all you need. You can switch to portal view with a single click to access all our other features at any time.

Also of note, is that your theme selection is applied to both versions of the homepage, so the Lite page will load the same theme you have set in the Full Portal, and any theme changes you make on the Lite page will be reflected when you switch back to the Portal.

GoWEB Tips

We’ve also started to rotate some tips to help highlight some of the features you have available. For example, you may see a panel to the right occasionally linking you popular Caribbean search results, as shown in the screenshot below.

A lot of people still don’t know that you can search just Caribbean sites. This feature is designed to put popular searches and other things at your fingertips. These tips appear in the far right corner of your homepage under the “Services” box, so as not to be intrusive.

GoWEB Toolbar

Last but certainly not least, we have updated the GoWEB Toolbar. The new toolbar sports a new array of icons, and a tighter design which has removed some little-used features, and hence relived clutter. Current toolbars were automatically updated. New users can download the toolbar at our homepage, gowebnow.net, or go directly to gowebnow.net/toolbar.

Also of note, the Toolbar download page has been redesigned. The new page is more interactive, showcasing the features of the toolbar as you mouse-over them.

I hope you all enjoy and utilize these new features. As always, you feedback is always welcomed. There is more in the works so stay tuned. Until next time, happy surfing from GoWEB.

Mario Herbert – Managing Director