Cloud Islands

The Lopez Island Historical Society

Project: Website redesign

The Lopez Island Historical Society needed a site that is fast-loading and easy to navigate. The design needed to work harmoniously with the Society's existing newsletter and other printed materials. Within these basic requirements, we wanted to create a site that utilizes the most modern standards-compliant markup and coding techniques.

The site is written in valid XHTML Strict and uses an “elastic” CSS layout. Using a combination of percentages and ems for setting the text size and layout containers, the layout will grow or shrink depending upon the text size that a viewer has chosen. The navigation elements are text-based, rather than image-based, so that navigation buttons scale to the desired text size as well. The advantage to this elastic layout technique is that whatever text size the site visitor chooses, the page columns will scale to maintain optimum line length for comfortable reading.

This site also uses microformats throughout. (Microformats are additions to the HTML markup that allow programs to process data in the web page.) For example, if a visitor to the site has either the Microformats Bookmarklet for Safari or the Operator plugin for Firefox, they can easily export the date, time, and a summary of an upcoming event into a calendar program like Outlook or iCal. The Museum site also uses microformats for its contact info and geographic location.

Visit Lopez Island Historical Society