Ultimately content should be supported by, not constrained by, design. The reason HTML was so successful and WAP such a failure was the ease of creating content. This may well break a standards compliant site, but the design decision should be in favour of more and more dynamic content. To make the content they want, they have to be able to add HTML or some subset of HTML to the page. They want to add an image in a certain place, highlight some text in a different color, put two lists side-by-side (eg pros and cons). Our experience is that whenever users start to be able to generate content, they want control over the content themselves. For small and medium sized businesses, flexibility and local user control are much more important. Neither are fully acceptable outside of large corporations. Another is that content has to be tuned or vetted by the designer first. If content is the responsibility of the user, how do you ensure compliance with web-standards? How do you make sure the content works correctly? One way might be to rule that content is only allowed in plain text or plain text and paragraphs. This means the design has to work whatever the content and the designer takes responsibility for the page framework, not what goes inside it.

Dynamic design recognises that content is the responsibility first and foremost of the user, not the designer. The base level for any website is the content - the information on the page. With bigger and more dynamic sites, designers have to design for growth and evolution of the content, which means designing in terms of five layers: content, page structure, page style (CSS), page interactivity and site structure.

This means that the sites themselves have to cater for more and changing content and a variety of ways of interacting with the site. Websites are evolving and becoming more dynamic and more interactive.

Web page layers