The Down Side of AJAX
I am now trying to work with a site that is done in AJAX. The entire site has about five pages and then the rest of the content (most of the content) is generated with AJAX. The decision to develop the site in this way was done long before I was involved. However, having to deal with it has been a learning experience. Here are some things that I have learned from this mostly AJAX site:
- AJAX has problems with search. None of the links are crawlable because spiders can’t handle the fancy JavaScript. It’s fortunate that this site is not a public site, though, so we really don’t care if it is crawled buy outside bots. Unfortunately, we have two Google Minis that are sitting around collecting dust that we could have easily used to provide an internal search function. Because of the way AJAX was used, they are just going to keep gathering dust.
- AJAX introduces usability problems. When users hit the back button on the site it takes them to the last page that they viewed. The problem comes when you go to an AJAX page and you use a bunch of controls to change the content in the page If you then hit the back button you will be sent to the previous page according to the URL, not the previous according to content. For example, let’s say you start on the home page, you go to the Laptops page that is made with AJAX, you navigate to one laptop, notice an accessory that you think is mildly interesting, you click on it, you look at it a few second and then you press the back button to go back to the item that you were originally interested in. What happens? You will be sent back to the home page! The user will probably not feel up to navigating to that laptop again if it took a while and so…drum roll please…Congratulations! you just lost a customer!
In brief, AJAX is cool for little online features, but I would stay away from using it heavily for a site.
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October 28th, 2006 at 9:23 am
This is a classic example of AJAX gone wrong. This would be my advice for whoever first developed that site: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Ajax is better suited for form interaction and when you need to save things in the background on the server. It shouldn’t be used to navigate through your content, especially when you want the search engines to crawl it. Keeping Google in mind is always important when designing new sites.
You know that already, but I’m just puttin’ in my two cents.