Beginner's Tips

Hello World!
I'm in highschool now, and I hope to find a job in web design.
Unlike most of the graduates I know, we are being forced to participate in a graduation project, which is essentially an 8 page paper and 20-30 min speech on a career of our choosing. It's worth an entire credit, so yes, I MUST do it. We also must come up with some kind of exhibiton that goes along with our topic. Any ideas? I figure I'll just talk about HTML, client side scripting, and server side scripting for the speech and paper. As for the exhibition, I'm thinking of building a site with examples of each.

Also, what do most of you do when you're building a new site? What do you take into consideration? I would like any tips you can give me on the creative process, design, flow, etc.

I would give a broader overview of application development in general rather than sticking strictly with html.

All applications/sites are developed through a similar process.

1) Requirements Gathering
2) Development
3) Testing
4) Deployment