We came out of beta last month and released our Radio Tuner in a 9.1 update. We’ve been working around the clock on our Browser Center, which was released yesterday in a 9.2 release. This center gives instructions on how to set GoWEB as your homepage in the different browsers. the just released Internet Explorer 9 is in there as  well as Firefox 4 which will be released next week Tuesday.

However, we’d been receiving some concerns about speed and stability and decided to make a crucial change ASAP. Just after sending version 9.2 live, we decided to reduce the “Flash load” of the site. Previously, your headlines were presented to you in an animated format, using the Adobe Flash plugin. This was a pleasant presentation but required users to wait until the headlines scrolled. Also, some  people’s computers couldn’t handle the volume of flash content that well. We decided to reduce the amount of flash used on the site, pushing out a major update in only one night. GoWEB 9.3 went live last night with a slightly different layout and less flash. You can now read the headlines a lot faster and your browser will load the page faster too.

Please enjoy these updates as we continue to evolve the site to serve you better.

Well, today, we are pleased to release to the public what we call Goweb SuperSearch. As off today, you can now select which engine you want to search with. None of the popular homepages allow you to do this, but now Goweb gives you the option to search with Google, Yahoo or Bing.

We’ve even included some other popular engines. You can now search Youtube, Wikipedia and even the Nation Newspaper from right on your homepage.

Doing research? No problem. You can lookup words in the online Dictionary and Thesaurus from your homepage as well, even passages from the bible.

We hope that you will enjoy and make good use of this new innovation to Goweb, and please remember to tell your friends, “Goweb has SuperSearch”.

Firstly, Goweb (the business) no longer exists. Goweb 9the website) is now owned by Rhema Media (http://www.rhemamedia.org). This change in owner doesn’t change the purpose or the core functionality of the Goweb you have come to know and love.

Now, I’m sure you have noticed that we are sporting an all new design of Goweb. Though it coincides with the change of  ownership, this redesign has been on the drawing board for a few months now.

This is the most drastic change in design we’ve made in a long time, and one of the fastest, considering that we did a makeover just five months ago. The last design, codenamed “Splash” was more about the source code and the look / feel of the site than it was about the layout. However, it became evident to us that there were flaws in the old layout.

The two major problems we’ve addressed in this new layout (simply referred to Goweb 9.0) are “expandability” and “discover-ability”.

Let’s start with the latter, Discover-ability. Many of our users were neglecting to use the “launchpad” which gives you links to the most popular sites, such as facebook and hotmail. People were using Goweb as a homepage and still typing addresses that are right in front of them as links. this new layout moves the launchpad to a place of greater prominence, right under the header.

you can’t miss that link to Facebook or your Email service anymore.

Now, let’s look at expandability. This layout has actually enabled us to add new components to the page like latest downloads from download.com and the latest movie reviews. That’s because it uses space more efficiently and even enables us  to easily expand the site  in the future.

Another thing we’ve always wanted to do was to make the “Featured Articles” more exciting, interactive and in-your-face. We’ve achieved that with this redesign and from a management perspective, it’s easier than ever to bring you interesting features on the fly as we find them.

Before I go, I just need to share a few matters with you. Firstly, you will notice that the new site is catered primarily to a Barbadian audience. This is because that’s where over 95% of our users come from. We’ll branch out into other islands later. Secondly, we’ve had to change our main search provider to Bing. We welcome your feedback on this and we continuously try to get you the best search offerings we can. And lastly, in case you are wondering about the absence of some of our trademark services, fear not,there are coming back. The Bajan Dictionary and other sections are being redesigned and the Minibus Guide has a very exciting future. In the mean time, we’ve kept the previous Goweb (Splash) available so you can continue to use the services we haven’t refreshed as yet. Just look for the link.

That feels like a mouthful (although I was typing) so for  now, I simply leave you to try out the new site. happy surfing, and as usual, your feedback is welcome.

Mario Herbert
Co-Director – Rhema Media

The recommended action is to use the latest version of Internet Explorer (8) or any other modern browser. All our new features work perfectly in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.  You should ALWAYS run the most up-to-date version of a browser anyway. However, we have still fixed the code so that persons using older versions of Internet Explorer can still have a good experience on our homepage. The earlier problems experienced should be no more, but we still urge all users to update t the more recent version of whatever browser they are using.

We recommend Google Chrome 7 – (Chrome automatically updates to the latest version)

You can also try Mozilla Firefox 3.6, Safari 5 or Opera 10.6.

You can also use Windows Update to update to Internet Explorer 8.

Thank you for your patience and continued support of GoWEB.

However, today we are pleased to announce the latest incarnation of GoWEB, codenamed “Splash”. For this incarnation, we’ve tried to keep the  basic layout with which you are familiar, but 99% of the underlying source code has been rewritten from scratch. The site you see today is NOT an update, but a totally new version, created with the latest web technologies available. All sections of the site have been redesigned from the ground up.

This meant that we had to make a decision about our themes. It wasn’t as simple as just “reusing” the old themes because the HTML elements of the page were being rewritten and renamed. We would have had to recreate the themes from scratch as well. We thought, what’s the point of recreating the same theme? As long as we have to recreate everything, lets do something fresh and new. The result is the “Splash Theme”, which is our default theme. To date, we have made two other themes, namely “Hibiscus” and “Nature”, but hang tight, more are on the way.

We hope you enjoy this redesign and have fun looking around to see what’s changed and what’s new. There are some totally new features on the site which we will not mention yet, but leave you to find. Until next post, happy surfing.

You would have seen the improvements and additions made to the Minibus Guide recently but now we’ve also created a YouTube Channel for that site. We’ve also made it possible for you to upload your own pictures to the site. When you submit your pictures, they will be reviewed and then added. We will email you to let you know when they are added. This is especially useful to Minibus owners and workers who may want to submit pictures of their buses immediately.

However, the major push this week is the Bajan Words Dictionary, which has seen a facelift and some accessibility changes to the navigational structure of the pages. Today we added a feature we’ve always wanted to add……Word Lookup. Users can now type a word and search the Dictionary pages to see if we have it. The search results will appear without taking you away from the page you are currently on.

We hope you enjoy these new features and will continue making improvements and additions to these two sites.

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.

• 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.