[kls]

Is this the "right" way to be doing this?

This is a subjective question and there is a lot of dogma surrounding the question. I tend to answer my questions with dollars as in are the dollars there to chase that market and would the money to chase that market be better spent chasing a larger market? My second question to myself if which is less costly to develop and maintain? Finally a little more hard to quantify but which can I make better conversions with?

The first one is pretty easy, for a good deal of sites the percentage of browsers that do not support or have JavaScript turned off is usually less than 1% I have seen numbers as high as 2% either way, it is below niche at best. It is pretty easy to make the statement that the money would be better spent chasing mobile or even in advertising for the 99% than it would be to chase the 1%.

The second one is a little more subjective but I have found for me and my team that writing UI's 100% in JavaScript/HTML/CSS simplifies the architecture and increases our time to market. I personally feel the worst solution is to sprinkle JavaScript into a server side solution such as PHP, ASP, or JSP it creates a more complex stack and complicates the solution requiring more layers and more specializations. With the UI being in all client side technologies, it becomes very easy to stub JSON messages and use those as the contract between front end and back end teams. I actually prefer the modern way of developing web application over the old server side model.

Finally I feel that the flexibility of JavaScript solutions and there rapid development model give them the edge on building UI's for conversion, simple tweaks can be made to the UI and delivered without the need for a full deployment of back end services. As well their are UI metaphors that just cannot be done in page-post. While I will be the first to note that this is subjective it works well for myself and my team and we have delivered some very large, adaptable, yet maintainable applications in JavaScript.