Hey everyone.
I was wondering, I’d like to start planning out two of my projects.
And would like some “first steps.”
If you were to design a Ajax startpage like www.netvibes.com or www.schmedley.com... where would you start?

This is probably way too vague, but I need to begin somewhere.

For a start, you’ll probably want to use one of the many javascript libraries out there that make this sort of thing much easier than coding the javascript from scratch. http://script.aculo.us/ comes to mind, with the drag/drop list reordering, including across multiple lists. You could probably accomplish the netvibes one this way, using a list for each column. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were another library out there that’s even better suited.

Also, I may be being too conservative here, but I usually try to code the site without any javascript enhancements first, to get a solid framework, and then add in the spice of the javascript-driven user interface afterwards. Once you start introducing AJAX, there are an awful lot of layers of interaction going on between the client and the server, which can be difficult to design and implement, much less debug. The architecture of the javascript/non-javascript applications will basically be the same underneath, and it will be easier to make design changes on the fly if you don’t already have several layers of interaction going on. Others may disagree here, I wouldn’t be surprised.

No disagreements here, although I am slightly further along than a total newbie when it comes to javascript. That being said, I really like the jquery library; it just makes sense to me.

Cool, thanks for the pointer to jquery. I hadn’t heard of it, and it looks much more concise for a lot of operations. Especially for sequential actions, which require extra effort in script.aculo.us.

Thanks for the info guys.
I’ll start looking for some script help and look into the framework.