AJAX Sorting

Lots of people ask, "how do I make sorttable sort the table the first time the page is loaded?" The answer is: you don't. Sorttable is about changing the HTML that is served from your server without a page refresh. When the page is first served from the server, you have to incur the wait for it to be served anyway. So, if you want the table sorted when a page is first displayed, serve the table in sorted order. Tables often come out of a database; get the data from the database in a sorted order with an ORDER BY clause in your SQL.

Read Article