Wired and Wonderful
Your Guide to Our Brand-New Web Site
Let the drums roll and the trumpets blare—Welcome to BBG's redesigned, fully accessible web site. Some technical background on the overhaul can be found below. Suffice it to say here that in addition to being accessible to people with disabilities, we're also available from now on to anyone using the Web via a cell phone or handheld computer. Halfway to the Garden but having doubts about how to get here? Whip out your cell phone, log on to www.bbg.org, and get directions. Thinking about buying a captivating new plant at your local nursery but unsure about what kind of care it requires? Check out our vast online library of gardening information, right on the spot.
Our new site also offers added benefits to all of you logging on to the Web the old-fashioned way—with a desktop browser at home or at the office. The photos and text on our redesigned home page and section index pages tell you at a glance what's happening at the Garden, what great new gardening information is available on our web site, and what buys are being offered in our online store. Our new site map makes it easy to find the information you're looking for, as does the new search box on the upper right of every page. No matter where you are, sit back, take a look, and be sure to let us know what you think!
The BBG Web Development Team
- Michael Barrish, Web development consultant
- Alison Dorfman, Web site manager
- Leah Kalotay, Designer
- Janet Marinelli, Director of Publishing
The Technical Story
The driving impetus behind the new BBG web site is improved accessibility. An estimated 15% of all Web users are disabled, the majority of whom are visually impaired. To better serve this population, the BBG web site now complies with Section 508, a U.S. law that provides for "equal and equivalent" access of information technology to all people with disabilities. Our new Accessibility Statement, itself a key element of the Section 508 mandate, tells the story in more detail and provides links to further reading and resources.
The new site is built according to a set of technological languages and specifications established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and known collectively as Web Standards. If that sounds a bit dry, the result—a site that's dramatically faster, more accessible, and easier to use—is worth getting excited about.
How is it done? Largely by separating content from presentation.
The site's content—its words and images—are now marked up, or coded, with XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). By using XHTML, the site is accessible to screen-reading software and to nontraditional browsing devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.
Presentation is handled exclusively by cascading style sheets (CSS). CSS allows us to control layout and design with a small number of master documents. This in turn lowers production costs and helps to ensure more consistent rendering for all pages and in all browsers and browsing devices.
The site's CSS is hidden from older, noncompliant browsers, so that visitors with relatively recent browsers will see the spiffy new design, while those using older browsers will view simpler, though no less usable, versions of the same pages.