GoWEB Blog » General

GoWEB Making A Splash Again

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:49:46 +0000

For those of you who have been using GoWEB before 2008, you would know that we have a tradition of upgrading our portal often. In 2008, we did a rewrite of our code and produced a better version of the then layout. This incarnation received so many position reviews that it lasted two years with no major updates.

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.

The Public Has Spoken & We Have Acted

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:34:00 +0000

Our statistics show that after our main portal, the most popular GoWEB sites are the Bajan Words Dictionary and the Barbados Minibus Guide. As such we have tentatively closed down some less visited sites and shifted our focus on improving the areas you visit the most.

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.

New Pics Come To Minibus Guide

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:03:39 +0000

We’re happy to announce that the Barbados Minibus Guide has been updated with new pictures. We’ve also added galleries to showcase more of the buses than can be done in the Wallpapers section. Our new galleries show closeup details of the body kits and interiors. Thank you to those who have been checking thus site and thanks to those who have recommended buses and made them available for photography. Look out for more pics soon.

We’ve Made The Cut

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:20:03 +0000

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.

September 2009 Statistics

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:07:57 +0000

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

Browsing in Style by Mixing Themes

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:19:54 +0000

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

New For October

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:28 +0000

Hi, all. We’re opening October with some new tweaks and more to GoWEB.

Firstly, we’ve tweaked the width of the site just a little. People viewing the site with a 1024×768 resolution screen will now see the entire width of the site without a horizontal scrollbar. This change takes effect across the entire website.

Secondly, we are pleased t o present our new YouTube Channel.

Not only is the YouTube channel redesigned but we’ve started producing some new videos in a “Discover GoWEB” section. We will be producing more helpful videos and restructuring the type of content overall on this channel.

These new videos have allowed us to open our “Discover” tab on the homepage. Just look in the Featured Content box and click “Discover”.

This is just the beginning. Keep your eyes and ears open as the year progresses and we strive to serve you better.

New Minibus Guide Hits The Road

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:19:48 +0000

We are pleased to inform you that we’ve launched a new, revamped Barbados Minibus Guide. This update has been a long time in coming but it’s finally here. The new site now integrates more closely with the rest of the GoWEB Network, and retains the primary layout of the other GoWEB sites, while still maintaining it’s own unique identity. We’ve added more wallpapers to the Downloads section with more still to come. We’ve also brought back the “Customization” page, previously called “Bajan Styles”. We hope you find this new sites enjoyable to use. Stay tuned for more, as we seek to improve our overall product.

You can access this site at either…..

http://gowebnow.net/minibus or http://minibus.gowebnow.net

Bajan Dictionary Still A Hit

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:23:14 +0000

Our Bajan Dictionary, called GoWEB Bajan Words, is still a big hit with our visitors. We’ve been getting feedback from you, our users, and you’ve been contributing words to the Dictionary as well. We updated the Dictionary yesterday, adding a few user submitted words, and allowing you to easily tell a friend about the site. Stay tuned for more exciting news about this service, as we are looking at ways to make the site even more fun, even more informative and even more Bajan.

Twitter and Other Updates

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:50:43 +0000

We are pleased to announce that you can now follow the happenings at GoWEB on Twitter.

Users of our homepage can also access Twitter from our Social Tray. We’ve also added eBay and About.com to our Web Trays for quick access to these services.

We’ve also changed our bookmark icon, (the little icon that shows next to the Website address or name). The new icon reflects our new logo and hence gives the oveall site more unifromity.

Also is note is that our Caribbean Anthems section has been updated to match the current look and feel of GoWEB Now. It now features it’s own variation of our new logo and a layout similar to the GowEB Directory.

You can access our Anthems site at http://www.gowebnow.net/anthems/