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I seen many sites which are refreshing their pages after a fixed interval. Sometimes it is 1-2 mins only.
If i refresh a page after every 5 mins. It'll helpful to notify user with updated contents. Please tell me
I hate websites which do this. I like to be in control of my browser, automatically refreshing the page without valid reason/warning* is a sure fire way for me to leave a website and never come back.
*There are times when refreshing is appropriate - the bbc sports website during sporting events (live football (soccer) matches, cricket, golf etc) has a smart piece of ajax which pulls the latest update in and moves the content further down the page - note the whole screen doesn't refresh. It's unobtrusive and there is a small warning stating that this happens.
Automatic refresh is fine if the content is something that is constantly changing and the users would expect and want the most recent content. ESPN.com uses this to update the pages where they report scores. In that case the reload the entire page. NFL.com only updates scores that change instead of reloading the whole page.
How you do it depends on your goals and your users' expectations. Using Ajax is a good idea as it is fast and doesn't affect page statistics like Google Analytics. But refreshing the page may be required if you want to count every page load or do other more complex things that may be too much for Ajax (or just simpler without it).
