Elm Fork Natural Heritage Museum

Direct access at: http://efnhmuseum.unt.edu/

Overview

The new websites for the Elm Fork Natural Heritage Museum and its companion laboratory, the Aquatic Ecology Lab were built with an eye towards strict adherence to web standards. Both sites are constructed using XHTML and CSS, separating content from presentation. This separation presents a number of advantages over traditional web development techniques. Specifically, sites built with web standards are generally more accessible to users who cannot access the content through traditional web browsers. With colors, page layout, and typographic conventions governed by an external file, content is much easier to maintain in the long term. At the same time, styling cues can be updated, altered, and changed quite drastically with a minimum use of time and resources. Finally, resources are optimized as each site’s footprint proves to be dramatically smaller than other sites of similar size.