Whatever happened to "progressive enhancement"? It's possible to build a very rich experience around standard HTML+CSS and then enhance it with Javascript. This is how much of Github works. I'm not saying you should always take that approach, but if you're a small company with limited resources you can still choose which route you want to go down, and if you choose "progressive enhancement" then you have a site you know will (mostly) work without JS, without having to do any extra work on top of you usual development process. Rich companies can, of course, take both routes, but if you're going to build a javascript-heavy site you should at least understand the trade-offs and alternatives before you dive in head-first.