I am very proud to announce the launch of my first professional website: The Trust for Museum Exhibitions. The idea was to make something that TME would be able to update themselves without having to pay their unreliable web techs $125/hour to make simple changes to the text.
I didn’t actually redesign the site much from what TME already had, but the whole thing looks cleaner and prettier now. Under the hood it runs very, very light. In fact, the entire site weighs well under 1 meg: over six times smaller than the previous code. The site is run entirely by MovableType using templates for everything so that it can all be edited from within the MT interface rather than needing FTP. It passes most of the U.S. Section 508 accessibility guidelines, making it available to blind and disabled users. The masthead image (thanks Matt Thomas!) uses StopDesign-style image-replacement to make it accessible. Everything is run by one (valid) stylesheet, which ensures that pages display uniformly and allows for easy alteration should TME want different fonts or colors. Almost every page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, with only a few errors on the inner-most pages being due to curly quotes and dashes that got copied in from the old text. With only two exceptions, every page validated on the first try! Once TME starts entering their own text there are sure to be some invalid entities that creep in, but the structure of the site should remain correct.
Thanks to Cyndi for letting me loose on place of e-business.