With a good toolkit (think dojo), AJAX can let you make a beautiful site.

One strategy I adopted was to use a dual delivery approach on the server side, so server side code can deliver either HTML or JSON. This allows you to reuse the server side logic.

Although I used custom code, with PHP 5.2’s json_encode function and Smarty, an even better implementation would probably be to wrap the delivery logic with a framework like Zend to completely separate the delivery form from the application logic.

There is a tremendous bandwidth savings, and the site interface becomes much smoother, since the only parts of the page that are refreshed reflect the content updates.

In addition, with a toolkit, there are often great widgets and features to create better and more powerful interfaces.

If AJAX will be used, the HTML architecture may need to be adjusted, so it may be worth building up a single page fully, prior to coding the remaining pages. A bit of server side logic can really help as well.