title: Should I load an entire html page with AJAX?
body: <p>My designer thought it was a good idea to create a transition between different pages. Essentially only the content part will reload (header and footer stay intact), and only the content div should have a transitional effect (fade or some sort). To create this sort of effect isn't really the problem, to make google (analytics) happy is...</p>
  
  <p>Solutions I didn't like and why;</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Load only the content div with ajax: google won't see any content, meaning the site will never be found, or only the parts which are retrieved by ajax, which arent't full pages at all</li>
  <li>show the transitional effect, then after that 'redirect' the user to the designated page (capture the click event of a elements): effect is pretty much the same as just linking to another page, eg. user will still see a page being reloaded</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I thought of one possible solution:
  When a visitor clicks a link, capture the event, load the target with ajax, show the transitional effect in the meantime, then just rewrite the entire document with the content fetched with the ajax request.</p>
  
  <p>At least this will work and has some advantages; the page reload will look seamless, no matter how slow your internet connection is, google won't really mind because the ajax content is a full html page itself, and can be crawled as is, even non-javascript browsers (mobile phones et al.) won't mind, they just reload the page.</p>
  
  <p>My hesitation to implement this method is that i would reload an entire page using ajax. I'm wondering if this is what ajax is meant to do, if it would slow things down. Most of all, is there a better solution, eg. my first 'bad' solution but slightly different so google would like it (analytics too)?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for your thoughts on this!</p>