We solve the problems that plague other web designers
Web design is very different from other mediums because half the time spent designing a website is wasted solving technical problems. For a start, a website on your screen might not look the same on someone elses. You might see a few small differences or in extreme cases the whole page can come out looking scrambled. The problem is there are so many differences between all the computers out there.
You probably dont notice this in your day to day browsing because web designers make allot of effort to get sites working on all the different browsers and computers use. Designers spend much of their time just trying to get their concept from paper to screen. Its not hard to imagine how this struggle leads to lazy design and corner cutting.
Its not just asthetics. Organising the content on a website is a whole new challenge. The average website can have anywhere from hundreds to thausands of files, each needing to be organised and updated. With all this content its not surprising that websites have trouble giving people the information they want and keeping it up to date. Updating hundreds of pages often results in the phenomenon of “monkeying” where a designer must alter the same thing on every page in the website until they go insane.
We’ve had our fair share of these problems and instead of living with them we’ve spent time trying to solve them. When we produce a website we can spend the time saved by creating a neater site.
Layout System
Computers might have made it easy to draw something on screen, but when it comes to the web this ease goes out the window. Our layout system allows us to produce fluid designs that look consistent on everyones screen.
Technical description
Like many progressive design firms we prefer CSS for layout rather than tables. However, our method is unique in that we use a Javascript based CSS extension to pin design elements to eachother and the browser screen area. The system can even fall-back gracefully on non-script browsers and in short lets us align anything anywhere with cross browser consistency.
Page Transforming
Updating a common design on hundreds of pages can be a nightmare for any web designer. Even making use of templates has its limitations. We’ve adopted the philosophy of page transformation, its a method that makes updating pages simple.
Technical description
The Document Object Model has revolutionised the way developers think of XHTML. Gobisoft makes use of XML transformation to modify pages dynamically based on the users location in the website. You can programatically edit the HTML of a page with complete flexibility and what makes this special is that its all done in real-time without the impact on speed you see in lesser platforms.
Labelling
Everyone knows how difficult it can be to find things on your own computer. Did I file this under ‘documents’ or ‘letters’? For most of us, filing involves putting things anywhere and
hoping you’ll remember where they are. Labelling or ‘tagging’ is an excellent and fast-growning way of organising fileson the web.
Technical description
Tagging/Labelling is already used extensively in many websites, especially in popular blogging software. At Gobisoft we take it all the way - everything in our websites is labelled. From the documents and blog entries to images, scripts and system files! With the labelling and metadata we use we can put files to some pretty interesting uses, mashups and lists.