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There are some possibilities with javacript and css. But if you care about traffic from search engines, then you're much better off loading an entire and separate html document for each bit of content. Otherwise your website ends up looking like there's only one url involved. All your content "belongs" to just that one page -- or worse yet, it's not indexed at all.
My friend suggested I could save bandwidth if I only reloaded the 'main content area' so that the columns and banners (where all the .imgs and links are) did not have to be loaded every time a user clicked a link.
On the topic of text: I'd say there will be no measurable bandwidth savings by only loading the navlinks once, as the file size of text is tiny. You might look into gzipping the pages if you want to make the file size (and thus bandwidth usage) of the text pages smaller.
Awesome knowledge bro. Thanks for the insight, I had no clue that the search engine would treat it as a single webpage. Since I want to be nicely indexed you make me think twice about the style of my website. For curiosities sake, do you know any Javascript or CSS codes that could do it anyways? It would be a nice little tidbit of knowledge for me as a growing web designer. Thanks again.
martin
You made a very interesting point. If I understand it correctly you are saying that most new browsers will store and reuse any redundant images, for each user session. This is a very cool feature for us bandwidth scrooges! I wonder what percent of average users (varies from target market to target market I'm sure, but still, on average) have a browswer with the settings for this cool feature to save us on bandwidth. Any ideas on a ballpark figure?
Thanks so much to both of you. Lovely forum with great posters!
do you know any Javascript or CSS codes that could do it anyways?
AJAX would do exactly that. Long before XMLHTTPRequest was called "AJAX," it was used by galleries to cycle images within a page, which was pretty much what you want. I remember using it, but eventually discarding it because of browser incompatibilities (no longer an issue these days).
However, as has been pointed out, there are significant disadvantages to doing it this way. I won't say don't use this technique at all, but it should certainly not be used for the entire site. You may want to consider using it for sections that can appear to search engines as atomic units (like gallery main displays).
works like frames, without the headache.
Same headaches. Bad for SEM, bad for bookmarking.
