As I'm watching the Colts game on television and digesting from the American holiday of Thanksgiving, I am actually going to do a blog post on our new website's progress (oh boy, working on a holiday, how dedicated).
One of the things we are excited about putting into our new site is JavaScript. Every since the Harbinger project and our last website, we have tried to add user experience to our site through client-side functionality with JavaScript. If you look onto ANY modern website, they are going to have JavaScript, and a lot of it! Sometimes it's a little overkill as to how much they actually push out to their users, but it's worth it since they get their message across.
The biggest problem with JavaScript is that some people turn off JavaScript in their browsers. This leads to no functionality on the client-side without a full page reload (A.K.A. Postback). Even worse, the user can be missing out on some of the goodness from JavaScript. The reason many people turn JavaScript off in their browsers is because of security. Many security experts recommend turning off JavaScript on the browser so that a website can't sneak weird things into your computer or behavior that just isn't cool.
Even if I don't fully agree with the practice of turning off JavaScript, I do agree with supporting the people who chose to turn it off. So in our new website, you can go ahead and turn off JavaScript and get the same information, just not in a really cool and exciting way. The way we do that is test to see if you have JavaScript enabled the first time you load up our site, and then adjust what we push out to you in terms of content based on whether you have JavaScript enabled or not. Critics to this might say that this is a small feat and is really simple to accomplish. Trust me, it's not. We had to be really smart as to how we were going to go about this without causing some serious server load and persistence issues. (I will do a post on my technical blog describing how we actually did it).
Focus on User Experience. If your user decides to not use JavaScript, still allow them to see your site, just in a different way. That's what we are aiming for: the best user experience with the most value to our potential and current customers.