Website Critiques

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a redesign of my website to showcase my software development skills. The overall idea was to create an AJAX-driven experience for my visitors which demonstrated a custom web application.

Yesterday, I posted several threads on a few web development message boards that I frequent asking others to review my site (currently hosted on a sub-domain). Granted the redesign isn’t finished, but the concept needed feedback.

…apparently, I forgot how unforgiving the web development community is.

There were a handful of positive remarks, but the overwhelming response was that people didn’t like the use of AJAX. Now, I’m smart enough to know that all “advice” needs to be taken with a grain of salt… but my ego was bruised nonetheless.

I’ve been working in the web development field for more than 10 years now, so I’m well aware of the limitations of AJAX. For argument’s sake, here are the most obvious limitations:

• If your users don’t have JavaScript enabled, AJAX doesn’t work.
• Search engines struggle to index content which relies heavily on JavaScript – thus AJAX is hardly ideal when considering SEO
• AJAX can actually slow down a website, particularly if your site needs to frequently load new information

All of that being said, I actually thought that AJAX would be the perfect technology around which I could center my redesigned website. Rather than building websites for small companies (a rather competitive market, mind you) I’ve decided that I should focus on software development — a relatively smaller, but more lucrative market.

Thus, highlighting what AJAX can do sounded like a great idea.

Sadly, my “friends” on the message boards didn’t like the concept; in fact, they basically ripped the idea apart. The consensus was that it looked kinda cool but was the wrong tool for the job.

The experience has me thinking that I should keep the AJAX-driven site as a sub-domain — one which I can link to from a static page. This approach will actually solve all issues with accessibility…

…but I’m still left with the original website, which desperately needs a face lift.Oh well, that’ll just be my next project. Stay tuned for the new sub-domain — I’m hoping to have that up by next week.