Ajax vs Being Known
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Here's a question for you all - I'm working on a commercial web site and I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design. All went well, but now I've somewhat hit the deadend when I got to the point where client has a problem advertising the site. So, what I'm interested in is - in your experience, what are the best practices on advertising an Ajax site and make it appear on a common search engine? Obviously, the site doesn't have many pages (it's virtually one page in total that can be directly called - default.aspx) and content is exclusively dinamycaly changed. Also, having no links to point to certain URLs, but onclick events, makes extremely hard for any search engine to pick up any other content except the starting page. The site is not live yet, but having this in mind, for a commercial site, I'm not sure if I should leave it as it is or start splitting pieces of it into iframes or otherwise. Last thing I would want is to make a technically superior site, but that will fail to acheive it's primary objective. Any taughts?
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Here's a question for you all - I'm working on a commercial web site and I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design. All went well, but now I've somewhat hit the deadend when I got to the point where client has a problem advertising the site. So, what I'm interested in is - in your experience, what are the best practices on advertising an Ajax site and make it appear on a common search engine? Obviously, the site doesn't have many pages (it's virtually one page in total that can be directly called - default.aspx) and content is exclusively dinamycaly changed. Also, having no links to point to certain URLs, but onclick events, makes extremely hard for any search engine to pick up any other content except the starting page. The site is not live yet, but having this in mind, for a commercial site, I'm not sure if I should leave it as it is or start splitting pieces of it into iframes or otherwise. Last thing I would want is to make a technically superior site, but that will fail to acheive it's primary objective. Any taughts?
Vladimir S. wrote:
I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design
Why? What requirments and/or specifications did Ajax provide the solution for?
Vladimir S. wrote:
technically superior
You mean Ajax is technically superior to something? What? Ajax is just a name they made up to describe something that existed since DHTML. We even implemented it once using a Java Applet. Back then you implemented that technique because you "needed" it. Now that there are libraries, code generators and other mindless developer products for Ajax I have no doubt that the technique will become widely abused.
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Vladimir S. wrote:
I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design
Why? What requirments and/or specifications did Ajax provide the solution for?
Vladimir S. wrote:
technically superior
You mean Ajax is technically superior to something? What? Ajax is just a name they made up to describe something that existed since DHTML. We even implemented it once using a Java Applet. Back then you implemented that technique because you "needed" it. Now that there are libraries, code generators and other mindless developer products for Ajax I have no doubt that the technique will become widely abused.
Totally agree. We all used that one way or another all these years. I just wanted to learn about experiences how such site could be made available for search engines.
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Totally agree. We all used that one way or another all these years. I just wanted to learn about experiences how such site could be made available for search engines.
Well I have not kept up with potential changes but remember "Web Crawler"? Search engines used to crawl over your site by parsing the anchor elements in the HTML etc. If they still do that you could put a "site map" type link on your home page that provides access to your various content through traditional anchor elements.
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Here's a question for you all - I'm working on a commercial web site and I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design. All went well, but now I've somewhat hit the deadend when I got to the point where client has a problem advertising the site. So, what I'm interested in is - in your experience, what are the best practices on advertising an Ajax site and make it appear on a common search engine? Obviously, the site doesn't have many pages (it's virtually one page in total that can be directly called - default.aspx) and content is exclusively dinamycaly changed. Also, having no links to point to certain URLs, but onclick events, makes extremely hard for any search engine to pick up any other content except the starting page. The site is not live yet, but having this in mind, for a commercial site, I'm not sure if I should leave it as it is or start splitting pieces of it into iframes or otherwise. Last thing I would want is to make a technically superior site, but that will fail to acheive it's primary objective. Any taughts?
I don't think there's a good answer here. When flash came on the scene big, we saw a lot of sites with a link: "Click here for HTML version" (and still do). That's probably how they get the bots to crawl the site. Also, what about bookmark's? If a user bookmark's your site, they will only be bookmarking the home page, no matter what they happen to be looking at while bookmarking the page. If you ask me, AJAX is only good for secure web application's on intranet's, or maybe a shopping cart, bank account application, etc. AJAX looks cool, but I think the hype will slow quite a bit once the web community catches on to this. "Half this game is ninety percent mental." - Yogi Berra If you can read thank a teacher, if you can read in English, thank a Marine. M y and h don't work so well due to m addiction to caffeine and m in abilit to to set a cup down uprigt.
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I don't think there's a good answer here. When flash came on the scene big, we saw a lot of sites with a link: "Click here for HTML version" (and still do). That's probably how they get the bots to crawl the site. Also, what about bookmark's? If a user bookmark's your site, they will only be bookmarking the home page, no matter what they happen to be looking at while bookmarking the page. If you ask me, AJAX is only good for secure web application's on intranet's, or maybe a shopping cart, bank account application, etc. AJAX looks cool, but I think the hype will slow quite a bit once the web community catches on to this. "Half this game is ninety percent mental." - Yogi Berra If you can read thank a teacher, if you can read in English, thank a Marine. M y and h don't work so well due to m addiction to caffeine and m in abilit to to set a cup down uprigt.
dotnethead wrote:
Also, what about bookmark's? If a user bookmark's your site, they will only be bookmarking the home page, no matter what they happen to be looking at while bookmarking the page.
I agree it's a problem, but it is fixable. http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Articles/38/[^]
dotnethead wrote:
AJAX looks cool, but I think the hype will slow quite a bit once the web community catches on to this.
I also agree the hype will die down, but it's cutting edge (or being more widely adopted) and I think browsers and the underlyng technology will change to deal with it way better. Just look how far beyond HTML we've already come. AJAX is the next evolutionary step. Granted, web development is a vast wasteland of technologies, by people pushing it to the limits, and it works (some of the time :)) Ahhh, wouldn't it be nice to start from scratch....
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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Here's a question for you all - I'm working on a commercial web site and I've chosen to go the Ajax way in it's design. All went well, but now I've somewhat hit the deadend when I got to the point where client has a problem advertising the site. So, what I'm interested in is - in your experience, what are the best practices on advertising an Ajax site and make it appear on a common search engine? Obviously, the site doesn't have many pages (it's virtually one page in total that can be directly called - default.aspx) and content is exclusively dinamycaly changed. Also, having no links to point to certain URLs, but onclick events, makes extremely hard for any search engine to pick up any other content except the starting page. The site is not live yet, but having this in mind, for a commercial site, I'm not sure if I should leave it as it is or start splitting pieces of it into iframes or otherwise. Last thing I would want is to make a technically superior site, but that will fail to acheive it's primary objective. Any taughts?
I'm in the same quandry, and decided to put links to "normal" pages that show the same content as the ajax stuff (just not as cool) so the creepy crawlers can find them.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
