Graceful degradation and AJAX

OK, time to fix this and support those folks that have been trying to access us from the plethora of mobile device out there that do not support JavaScript. This should not be too much of an issue because we were just too lazy when we coded up the AJAX pages. Gonna suck for the Google maps because they will not be supported but at least the Coffee House and photo’s will work. While we are making these changes we will also make the changes so that people can cache the pages on their mobile devices. So off we go and create some static pages that are generated when the data is updated. Pretty simple.

As we were testing these rather simple changes, we started to use some of the Google services other than search, such as Google Sitemaps and Google Analytics. For those of you who have not seen this yet, they give you some pretty good information about how they see your site and also various usage statistics. One look told the whole story. It turns out that all that all of our JavaScript enabled dynamic pages together with the dynamically generated url’s were breaking the search engine BOT’s.

Because we are still working feverishly on the site. We are not ready for people to start to use us but hopefully someone else will be able to learn from this experience.

Here is a great list of the things that need to be done to optimize your position in the search ratings.

http://www.schillmania.com/content/opinion/2005/10/on-seo-and-spamming/