AJAXifying Top Level Navigation

[Scott]

Hi.  We are building a typical website that has a constant header, footer, and left frame w/ a PanelBar for navigation, which changes the contents of a main content frame/RadPane, and I use a Master Page with content areas to accomplish this.  What is Telerik's recommendation for doing the navigation, i.e., shouldn't I AJAXify it so that as people click the links in the PanelBar, only the main content pane refreshes, changing to whatever .aspx page of mine they clicked to go to?  If I do this, obviously my content pages would no longer be children (or whatever) of a master page, they would just be standalone pages that would fill the content area, but in thinking about it, is this like having a 1-page site - I read in a forum somewhere that that's what you'd have and it's not recommended but I can imagine the AJAXification would make the look and feel quite nice.  Also, would the PageLoad event still fire when I load the page into the main content area - we need to track our visitors usage and we have code that logs this (I guess you could put on the click of the PaenlBar). 

Does Telerik/everyone have a recommendation or best practices of whether to do a site like this or not (most major sites I've seen, even with some ajaxification, do not - when you click their main menu/navigation links, the whole page refreshes), and if so, is there a link to an example of this?


Thanks a million!


Scott

[Sebastian]

Hello Scott,

My colleague Veli already responded in the support ticket you opened with regards to this subject. I am posting his reply in this forum thread for reference:

Please, note that MS AJAX framework does not support IFRAME ajaxification, if that is what you meant. You would get regular postbacks inside the IFRAME, whether or not you have AJAX set up.

We, just like most web pages you see out there, recommend navigating to different URLs (physical pages) from your menu panel. This provides a number of benefits like better SEO, cleaner site structure, and most importantly if you use AJAX - proper AJAX-ification of your page.

A third approach you can take is when all your pages are actually user controls (ASCX)  and you load them dynamically on your main container in a single ASPX page. In this way, you now get full AJAX support (as you can AJAX-ify your entire user control place holder and get all controls inside AJAX-ified), but, on the other hand, you do not get any visible site structure and URL mapping.

Best regards,
Sebastian
the Telerik team

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[Scott]

Thank you!

Scott