Planning interaction
Something that has a huge impact on a site’s development is the degree of interactivity it enables. Every site allows people to navigate it using links, of course, and most enable the use of contact forms and search boxes.
Some websites, though, enable much more sophisticated interactions and become almost indistinguishable from software Facebook is as fully featured as any email program, for example. Adobe has online photo editing software, including Adobe Photoshop Express Editor (www.photoshop.com/tools):
Think about how you want people to interact with your content. For example, do you want them to be able to vote or comment on their favorite pages? Do you want to include an interactive tutorial that explains how your technology works? What about enabling people to customize content and download it? Do you want people to be able to connect with their friends and share information with them?
In short: what kind of experience do you want your website visitor to have? And what will you empower them to do?
In many web design projects, the degree and type of interaction determines the complexity and cost. Flash animation requires more specialist design skills, for example, and any website that involves storing data from visitors will need software to be installed on the server. In many cases, that software will need to be written especially for the website, which can be expensive.