A Demo of the New Site Design
Why redesign the site?
The new design utilizes Cascading StyleSheets (CSS) for layout. This has some advantages over the current design:
- File Size: The original pages required over 600 Kb for the data and images. The new design uses less than 400 Kb. This makes it easier for people will slow Internet connections to access the site
- Flexibility: The new design can be changed much more easily than the old design, since all layout is described by one file.
- Printing: With the old layout, some browsers cut off text on the right of the page. With the new design, a separate style can be used just for printing, which makes it easy to hide extraneous information (like the background picture) when printing.
- Accessibility: The new site design is much more accessible to those with visual disabilities or a text-only browser (it follows U.S. Section 508 Guidelines for accessibility).
- Standards Compliance: The new site conforms to the XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2 standards. This means that the website will be viewable in all modern browsers (even on strange platforms, like PDAs or cell phones).
Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to the new design as well:
- Inconsistency: Because the layout is determined by the browser, the layout may be slightly different depending on the OS/browser that is used to view it.
- Netscape 4 Incompatibility: Netscape 4 doesn't support current web standards, so the layout that Netscape 4 users will see is a stripped-down version of the design everyone else sees.