Starting off fresh in 2023, we have a refreshed website! The site still looks and feels familiar but has many updates and rewrites under the hood bring the codebase up to date with more modern and stable web standards.

The goal of this refresh was threefold: to improve accessibility, improve usability, and set the stage for more rapid development by modernizing the technology that drives the site.

We’ll go deeper into specific improvements in other posts, but here are a few general category highlights those spotlights will fall under.

Accessibility

The web has important standards around formatting code to be accessible by all users. This includes structuring a page in logical order for screenreaders, marking items correctly that appear and disappear, and making content visually unchallenging to read. Along those lines, we made adjustments to our website in the following areas.

• Document Hierarchies
• Outlines (Dashed Box)
• Keyboard Navigation
• Alt Text and Image Descriptions
• Contrast

Technology

The basic building blocks of the web remain the same, however the libraries and tools to maintain code edited by multiple users over time keeps evolving. We made some updates to ensure our codebase remains healthy and editable in the future.

• CSS: Moved from custom CSS/SASS compiler to TailwindCSS
• Javascript: Moved from custom javascript/JQuery to Vue.js

User Experience

Specifically related to our website and tools, we tackled some challenging rewrites that made the applicatins more intuitive for modern web content creators and how they have become accustomed to adding, saving, and publishing content. We will dive deeper into the assessment of these tools and and the subsequent improvements.

• Digital Tour Builder / Article Builder 2.0
• Collections Search
• Exhibition Images