I talk to web developers often, and one thing they still say strikes me as weird.

Many of them don’t want their site to self-refresh, or be entirely in Ajax. Let them refresh, they say. I agree that Ajax and Flash is sometimes unnecessary, but on certain type of sites, with lots of fast-changing data, having new data show up without refreshing the page (think stock market data, for example) is essential.

The reason for this is simple: page views are still one of the most important metrics considered when measuring the popularity of a web site.

Many arguments have been brought about page views being dead, and they were all right.

However, old habits die hard. As long as page views are considered to be relevant at all, companies won’t risk having their competition laugh at their puny page view numbers, and they’ll shun elegant Ajax, Silverlight, Flash or Flex solutions and replace them with good old HTML and a refresh button.

Since both Nielsen and comScore have acknowledged this problem and adapted their metrics - Nielsen now tracks how much time visitors spend at the site, while comScore gives more weight to visits instead of page views - web developers should relax and follow suit. Unfortunately, robbing yourself of a potentially important advantage still seems to risky to most of them, so they choose to stick with whatever approach gives them more page views.

If you’re wondering where did the year 2005 from the title come from, it’s the year the term Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was coined. Now, Ajax is already considered slightly obsolete, and some developers are still afraid to use it because they’ll lose page views. Time to let go of the past, folks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 7:19 am and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.