I’d like to explain why I always prefer to start theme development from the ground up (or using a theme framework like our very own IgniteWP) instead of buying a theme that aligns with the design the client wants.

There are a few reasons:

1. Theme updates break your implementation. Besides security updates, you normally don’t want to change your layout unless the client requests it, or you want to offer something different. You know not to update the theme, but  the client might log into wp-admin and say, “Hey, there’s an update – I better do that!” Before you know it, you’ve got a bunch of emails saying that the site has stopped working.
2. Only a few people work with base themes nicely. To work properly with themes, you need to use child themes – a cool feature from WP, but I rarely see implementations using these. If you don’t use child themes, the well-intentioned update problem mentioned above can completely erase your work from the server. If you don’t have a backup available, well, good luck!
3. Option screens get out of control fast. Normally, themes bought in stores are generic and made to target a specific type of website. You normally don’t need so many settings. It can also be confusing if you have a web marketing company and have to remember where the settings are for each theme, and how to work with each of them.

None of these things happen when building a layout with IgniteWP. We can match any design from the ground up, and deploy themes fast with the help of Bootstrap and ACF.

Of course, the upside of using a generic theme is cheap theme development, but eventually coding time will catch up with you. Trust me – we see this all the time at Saucal!

A big trend in web design, mostly from 2012-2014 was to have a ‘scrolling website’. A website in which you had no pages, but all of the content was displayed on a never ending home page.

Bad example: https://thegrid.io/
Considering this is “AI” it’s the worst website I’ve ever seen.

Site design
– Long scrolling websites are a passing fad from 2013-2014, which was lead by designers, and not data scientists.
– Mostly hurts SEO.
– Designs like this forget people without a trackpad. The super small scroll bar is not present.

Search engine optimization
– Due to the nature of the design, your SEO is hindered by several factors:
– Bounce rate is 100%
– Statistically, people don’t scroll
– Due to no inner pages, a keyword strategy cannot be applied
— Rank for less words
— No unique titles and meta descriptions
— You’re ranking for 1 page, not several
– Cannot create cohesive idea for each page and homepage suffers from too many ideas

Sales
– No depth. You cannot see what pages people were most interested in. Example.

Usability: people don’t scroll, seriously. See our page, as well as top analytics company Crazy Egg, KISS Metrics, as well as Shopify.

Solution
– Don’t use scrollers
– If you do, use AJAX and SEO. This creates the illusion of a scroller, but gives you the benefits of single pages. An example is here.

Travelling and working sure is bliss.  You get the opportunity to learn new cultures, make some awesome connections and all in all, I think you get to enjoy life while you work!  Travel and work, is however, not all fun and games and after a year of living in Europe (all over the place), here are my tips to make the transition from working in one location to working in many smoother.

Pre Planning.

-Choose a location that is not more then 6h away in time zones, unless you want to be a zombie and never see the light of day. Talk about work times and hours.

-Travel days add up.  We all try and find the cheapest flights, but from time to time, go for the slightly more expensive flight day so you can travel on weekend for your shorter haul moves. This will give you more time to enjoy days you take off for the real experience.

Use the right technology.

-Slack

-Phone Data & Unlocked phones or a Nomad 4G box.

-Stay on top of a schedule using a PM software & Google Calendar & timezone.io

-Team Meetings every week.  Don’t skip them.

Seeing people you know & letting loose.

-Knowing when to start and stop working.

–

So a few years ago, a bunch of sites started implementing AJAX navigation. It allowed smooth transitions from one page to the other. Load times increased, and overall, the UX was great.

But there were some issues with it. Your sites looked incomplete to search engines, trashing all the effort you’d put into your SEO rankings.

After avoiding this approach for a while — because we care a lot about SEO (and you should too) — we decided to research how could we do this within our sites (mostly built with WordPress).

The important thing to know is that search engines don’t execute JS, so the direct links to each URL of the site need to look nice SEO-wise (with meta tags, H1 tags and all). All good — we’ll make no changes to the templates — just navigate through the site doing AJAX requests to bring up the complete HTML of the page we need to load, and replace the content container with the new one.

That doesn’t sound right. It would allow us to do smooth transitions, but load times would still be the same (or slightly smaller).

We then realized that we didn’t need the header to load for all pages. We just needed it to load the first time the user arrived directly at our site (or if the page didn’t get loaded through AJAX). And there you go! We improved the UX with smooth transitions, improved load times, and kept all the SEO juice.

So, to answer the question in the title, it turns out that with a little extra work you can have both AJAX and SEO!

If you need to do something like this, our IgniteWP framework has a module you can use to avoid doing this work yourself. Sounds good, right?