In 2016 Google popularised the term "progressive web app": a website that installs to the home screen, loads instantly from cache and works offline, using service workers and a manifest. For Eziline, which had always built for the web first, it was a welcome idea. The same year a regulatory nudge in Pakistan sent businesses looking for exactly the kind of websites we had been making since 2007.
PWAs in client work
We added service workers and web app manifests to the dashboards and customer-facing portals we were building, so a sales rep on a weak connection could still open the order screen and a customer could save the shop to their phone. HTTPS became non-negotiable as a result, and we made it standard on every site we hosted. Our own site followed in early 2017, which got its own post at the time.
SECP and functional websites
In December 2016 the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan directed companies to maintain functional websites with up-to-date corporate information. We wrote about it at the time, because it matched what we had been telling clients for years: a website is a business record, not a brochure. The directive brought a wave of enquiries from companies whose sites had been built once and abandoned.
Around the studio
- 2D animation became a listed service after years of ad-hoc multimedia work.
- We published practical guides, including one on sharing your screen for remote support, the beginning of the "Guides" category on this site.
- The ERP, POS and hospital products from 2015 picked up their second and third clients and their first big feature requests.
By the end of 2016 the company had the shape it has today: products, custom development, design and media, hosting and support, and training. 2017 would make it official on paper.
Looking ahead
The to-do list for 2017 was mostly official: incorporate the company in Pakistan, register an entity in the UK for the growing export work, move the company's own site to HTTPS, and refit the Rawalpindi office, which the team had long since outgrown. On the product side, the ERP and POS products needed multi-branch support and the hospital system needed a pharmacy and laboratory module, all driven by requests from the first clients. Mobile was about to change too: Google's announcements at I/O 2017 would make Kotlin official for Android and introduce Flutter, and the mobile team planned to evaluate both. Finally, the company decided to start showing up: at university open houses to hire, at industry bodies to be heard, and eventually at international exhibitions, which began the following year with Gitex.
