I. Introduction
There are many factors that can contribute to the effectiveness of an e-commerce system as well as the rate of adoption among site visitors. A web site is most often successful when it does a good job in each of five factors: download speed, navigation, content, interactivity, and responsiveness (Palmer 2002). All of these can be affected by an efficient and effective interface, and it for this reason that I am going to examine some of the major interface technologies available and their impact on these five factors. The specific technologies that I will examine are basic HTML, Java, Flash, and Ajax. My experience with web interfaces began in 1995 when the first popular web site that was not available on an edu domain was by a small company called Yahoo. During the last eleven years, I have worked with a variety of web technologies on both the client side and the server side. Throughout this paper, I have included personal professional experience in relation to web application development as well as their impact on web users in addition to supporting the major points with separate research resources.

This was a paper I wrote about Ajax for one of my Master's classes. While it is not necessarily timely for most web developers, it may be of interest to IT managers and others not as closely connected to the web development field.

For the last couple years, the view of the web has been undergoing a change. Web applications that involve filling out forms, clicking submit, and getting a result are changing to behave more like desktop applications. Many active users of the web have experienced web sites like Google's maps and photo-sharing web site Flickr to see something newer, more dynamic, and more responsive. These web sites use a new web programming paradigm called AJAX.