Adding smoothness to your site

Modern websites are often choosing to go down the Ajax route. This can mean just implement certain ajax patterns on elements within the site, or using a pre-defined framework such as MS-AJAX or Prototype.

In addition to the basic framework such as prototype and YUI, there are other additional items such as Scriptaculous that makes all kinds of animations and transitions possible.

Using these frameworks, our developers are able to add such thing to your site as

• Animated sites that do not require flash:

  Many people love the feel of an animated site, but hate the slowness of flash sites, not to mention the problems of accessibility or browsers that do not support flash. By programming the same animations in Ajax using Scriptaculous, and using noscript properly, we are able to support such clients as mobile phones through to the latest PC browsers. Bu using a graceful degradation strategy we develop code that works everywhere you want it to work, and can look and feel just the same as your flash site, usually much faster.

• Drag and drop style UI:

  from shopping carts to e-mail systems, users have started to demand drag and drop capability, with Ajax this is possible within any application

• Repeat calls to a database without the need for page re-loads:

  instead of constantly reloading a new page each time a new item within a pages is wanted, we can use Ajax to replace only the desired data leaving the rest of the page alone. This can save you much bandwidth as the browser only receives the data that it needs at that moment

• Reduce the visual footprint of a site:

  by utilizing the pull-out, expand, drop-down and other transition capabilities of ajax, a site can have a reduced size foot print on the screen, offering cleaner access to the site for small screen browsers

Graceful Degradation

With any Web 2.0 or Ajax site, there has to be the decision made on how it will function if Javascript is not available. This can be as simple as defining a route through the site to a sales end-point that does not require Ajax to be available, or it can be as complex as making the entire site both available to a Javascript client (PC browser) or a non-Javascript client (mobile phone). We help you to make this decision, factoring in the increased cost of additional development.