Understanding Your Client Base
The amount of Ajax functionality that you introduce to your site depends on more than just how much you're willing to add and maintain. Even the niftiest technology is going to fall flat if it doesn't provide an added value, or worse, locks your users out of the site. What you will discover, though, is that if you listen to the feedback from your client base, you'll be able to use a little scripting and a few in-page web services to really increase the usability of your site.
Discovering Your Clients
The first step in your Ajax makeover is discovering all you can about the people who visit your site so that you plan accordingly. Your best friends in this regard are your site's logs. The following log entry is from one of my sites, and it is a fairly typical example:
5x.x2.x8.xx0 - - [31/Aug/2006:03:09:27 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/ bbgun/bbgung.png HTTP/1.1" 200 90338 "http://burningbird.net/wp-content/themes/bbgun/ style.css" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6"
This log displays the date, the resource accessed, and a string containing information about the client's operating system and browser. In this case, the browser is Firefox version 1.5.0.6, and the operating system is Windows. Another line from the log is:
x0.xx3.1xx.xx4 - - [31/Aug/2006:03:14:48 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/ words/eyesafe.png HTTP/1.1" 404 9058 "http://burningbird.net/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; ...