Edi Budimilic

We at GEM Studio are working hard to develop the most advanced website that we’ve made so far, and this project is our own company website.  So what’s so special about our new site? I’ll tell you :)

• AJAX calls everywhere, the most important part we use it – is main content. Every click to a page you want to open loads the content directly into the content part without reloading and thus saving bandwidth and loading time.
• HTML5 tags like <article><header><footer> and so on. This may be useful to future developments of search engine and other crawlers so they know exactly where’s the expected duplicate content like Menu options and  content location.
• CSS3 styles all around, shadows, rounded corners (like in the pic on the right), etc. Internet Explorer gave us some headache but we’re managing it with CSS2.1 and MS Filter effects to come as close as we can to CSS3 result in other browsers.
• Goodbye Internet Explorer 6, no support for you. What this means for us is more coding freedom :) but still fighting with IE7.
• WordPress Blog integrated in main design/within website, no /blog directory.
• Social integration like Facebook Like on all content, FB comments on all articles, standard share options via Twitter and other networks, our tweets always in the sidebar with important news and hosting servers notifications.
• Better integration of Live Support chat with Client control panel.
• Killer Ajaxed domain availability checking, supporting over 350 (cc)TLD’s including Croatian ccTLD (.hr and .com.hr).

And much more! We hope you like what we’re doing and expecting your feedback as soon as we publish the website.

All these latest Google Search algorithm changes are making our visitor stats going wild both ways. The most important thing many webmasters forget to check after building a website is it’s loading speed. So many of them loading over 4 sec., even those with basic WordPress installation.
(try W3 Total Cache plugin).

I was dismissing Google algorithm changes at first, until I saw the stats for one of our websites; http://webimenik.biz to be exact. Website visits fell to over year and a half old averages. When I checked loading time it was obvious, WebImenik load time was over 5 sec. and first 3 was taken by CPU getting necessary data to show the front page.

So I’ve sat down and built Caching support which made our website faster by 50% and with few other tweaks like merging css files, minifying and compressing javascript it got to 60% improvement in speed. I could do it much more better but that requires too much time. Your visitors and Google will be thankful just with the basic tweaks (15min job), now get to work! ;)

Great online tool for checking website speed: http://tools.pingdom.com

There are many methods to make Ajax operations crawable by Google and other search engines. Many are still saying it’s not the right time yet to use Ajax for all dynamic content. I disagree! Google already introduced their method to make this work but it’s too complicated and needs a lot of additional programming time to make it work properly.

I on the other hand have a great idea that’s stupid simple, works for Googlebot and browsers with disabled Javascript. Isn’t that great!? :)
Even dough I came up with this idea myself, someone elase in the world had the same idea before me and it’s called Hijax. So what is Hijax in definition?

Hijax is combination of words Ajax and Hijack and that’s it’s core functionality. Hijax uses both Ajax and Javascript when available (to create those magical effects that Desktop apps had for decades). Hijax is using Javascript when available to hijack HTTP request (when website visitor makes a click on a link to another page) and enables Ajax magic to happen. But, when you open the page in a browser that doesn’t have Javascript enabled, the website functions as it should (without fancy effects that Ajax can provide), it opens the page with preloaded content. Hijax method is a great time and bandwidth saviour.

And finally the interesting part.
The example, dead simple:

<a href="page-2.html" onclick="AjaxCall('page-2'); return false;">

* Use this method on all links intended to work with Ajax calls.

That’s it! So simple! We are already using this method on our new company website that’s currently in development.

Yes! It’s finally here, an update to web portal dedicated to freeware, shareware, AAA titles and online game reviews. Sadly, we’ve been busting our guts working on everything but the projects we actually love doing. Time has come to change our priorities and we’ve been doing that successfully this year. We updated some of our websites with new content and better SEO, released totally new advertising system that is simple yet smart in it’s core, then mobile version of sveznar.com (a dream definitions service) and now – igrice.hr, with new design and newly published facebook features like the Like button and Comments. There’s a lot of work to be done on all our project to reach the point of success.

Aldough I write in English, I do hope you like what we do and how we do it. We have plans with new projects for the world market so please stick with us and be a part of our growth.

Now, check igrice.hr and if you’re local, leave a comment or two on our game reviews ;)

Yes, I’m calling this post a package full of updates. Last few weeks I’ve taken more time to work on our own (GEM Studio) projects so here are few of those updates if you’re interested ;)

Sveznar.com
(Croatian only service for dream definitions, meaning of karma, lucid dreaming, lucky numbers etc.)
– additional SEO was done
– new content on Karma
– mobile version for dream definitions (iPhone, Android and others supported), just jump to the site with your mobile phone and you’ll be redirected to http://m.sveznar.com. Shown as cool iPhone w/ Android image below the menu on desktop version of the website.

CroDNS.com
(Croatian only service for checking domain availability in a smart way)
– footer iPhone image to tell the new visitors there’s a mobile version (m.crodns.com)
– ping has been fixed
– some security improvements

SuperCentar.com
This is our new service for banner advertising on our own network of websites with over one million pageviews a month and growing. The service was just released few days ago and it’s currently operating for Croatian market only.

This is it for now but many more updates will come soon. We plan to finish all started projects dedicated to Croatian market but right after that we’re starting with realization on international projects, not only on the web but the iPhone and Android apps too. Can’t wait! :)

There is a time in your life when you think you know where you headed but what happens to many of us is that we forget to steer back on that (dream) line once in a while. It happened to me also. I started working what I love, in IT industry. But I noticed that building standard websites for Croatian clients started to look like a saleswoman dragging bought items over bar-code scanner in a local store, beep .. beep .. beep. That was not my dream!

My colleague and I were slapped by competition and their story recently. And long story short, we need to put more effort in foreign market and start building our business there. Our knowledge is not appreciated well in Croatia what makes it hard to earn enough money for a decent living. So you may guess what to expect from us in the future.

I’ll keep updating you and you keep visiting my blog! ;)

So many new clients, so much work but where to find the time to develop all this requests. I had to put titlovi.hr aside for a while unit we finish top priority websites for our clients. Here I’ve just finished this template and sent to the client for confirmation. Contact form is not well designed because it’s pain in the but to style it in photoshop so don’t judge me on that until I finish the CSS part of it ;)

Web template can be best seen here: http://izrada.gemstudio.hr/grill-lovorka.hr/

Hi folks. Titlovi.hr is on it’s way to finished within a month. Main idea is to build the best website for searching movie subtitles for domestic territories. But not just “best” like they all say :) best as usable, without ads and unnecessary content and of course, maximum use of Ajax technologies.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest template:
http://izrada.gemstudio.hr/titlovi.hr/

Yes, it’s official. Official Lyrics is finally done, after 3 months of work, actually 12 hours of efficient programming. There is much to improve on the SEO side but the lack of time I have, I’ll call it finished. :)

So please visit the site or better yet, link to it! :) There are about 500 000 songs in there and Google is doing bad job at crawling it fast. I’ll put AdSense on it when I reach the goal of 400+ unique visitors daily.

Link: Official Lyrics

Finally, everyone wanted it but no-one made it .. until now! I didn’t like launching Safari, then going to Gmail and surf through it within limited space of the browser. And so I’ve made a full screen App without browser features.

I made it possible with a little cool browser meta feature “apple-mobile-web-app-capable”. To test it yourself go to http://gemstudio.hr/gmail/ and add this bookmark to Home Screen, there’s your Gmail App!

Download full source : gmail-web-app.rar (html, css, psd app icon)

Gmail for Safari - before

Gmail App for iPhone