A Look At AJAX: Outside Help
Well, with the crashing of my computer, I appear to have lost the AJAX examples I had been working on in my spare time (which has been rather scarce lately), so I'm going to wrap up the series by giving some references of places to look for more information. I found these sites useful when trying to learn AJAX, and I'm sure you will too!
AJAX Tutorial (http://www.ajaxtutorial.net/index.php/category/ajax-basics/, starting with the basics)
W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp, and they're pretty good for any basic introduction to a web-based language or methodology)
Sun Java AJAX Intro (http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/ajax/tutorial.jsp, a little more technical, if you're into that sort of thing)
Mozilla Developers Intro To AJAX (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started)
The Big List of AJAX Tutorials (http://ajaxmatters.com/archive/2007/02/17/ajax-tutorials.aspx, over 140 various tutorials to whet your appetite)
Hopefully you'll find enough there to get you started. And if you ever get some AJAX working and come up with a really cool feature for your church website, feel free to let me know so we can share it with the world!
Good luck and happy coding!


I would highly recommend that anyone looking into Ajax adopt an ajax framework such as Prototype, Google Web Toolkit or Yahoo's YUI. There are numerous ones available, find one that suits your needs.
Personally, I've had great success with the Prototype framework http://prototypejs.org/learn
Regarding SEO, as far as I know, the major search engines won't index javascript content, especially asynchronously loaded content.
There are numerous ways to resolve this, such as providing a certain amount of search engine relevant static content on your ajax pages. Another option is to provide specialized seo landing pages for the site.
Take a look at http://illinoisinsurance.com for an example of static content mixed with ajax functionality. If you'd like to try out a quote, use zip code 60638 or any valid illinois zip code.