The Museum of Childhood site is fully accessible and is produced by XSL within a content management system
Following the relaunch of the V&A website, funds were secured to redevelop the website for the Museum of Childhood. The original site contained just 15 pages, but the new site had a completely new design and a lot more content – on launch in October 2005, there were 209 pages, rising to 250 pages two months later.
I worked closely with the designers, Tape London, to create HTML designs that not only conformed to the government's web standards and WCAG 1.0 Level A, but were also built out of simple component parts, each of which had to validate to the XHTML standard. I then took these designs and recoded them in XSL within Rhythmyx, the museum's content management system, to produce the final, working website.
The relaunched website saw an instant rise of 50% in visitor figures, and this continued to grow over the following year. We trained staff at the museum in Rhythmyx, and during the closure of the museum for renovation in 2005/6, staff were able to update parts of the site themselves, particularly the online diary describing the development. The museum is now well positioned to cope with an influx of web traffic when the museum reopens in October.
