Visual design is up to the event coordinator, though the event pages will be framed by the site navigation headers & footers, which may affect your choice of color scheme.
The site is using XHTML 1.0 Strict (XHTML 1.0 Transitional may also be used if necessary; it is currently used on a minority of the existing pages) served as text/html, with CSS 2.0 for all the styling and layout. Tables should not used for layout except in special circumstances. If the designer thinks they're necessary for compatibility in this case, please check with the NPPA Web Site Administrator.
Our current top-5 browser list (for compatibility testing purposes) as of April 2006 is as follows:
Your pages will be framed by the existing site navigation structure, which shouldn't affect anything (except color choice, of course) as long as the designer doesn't use absolute positioning. Note however that to accommodate visitors with smaller screens, and to allow room for the side navigation and advertising, your page content should be able to reflow smoothly to fit in a 592-pixel-wide space. There is no specific upper limit on width, but someone with an 800x600 screen should be able to view your pages without horizontal scrolling.
You can use server-side includes within standard XHTML files, in case you have shared navigation lists or something like that. The server supports additional languages such as PHP and Perl as well. The use of Flash animation is discouraged, but can be considered on a case-by-case basis, providing that the Flash Designer is willing to provide direct support to end users experiencing difficulties with the animation.
Page size targets are 50-60 KB, including all the images and included external files (shared stylesheets and graphics only count against you once, of course). Typically, an event subsection will run about 1 MB per year, including all pages, graphics, and registration PDFs – and that's what the disk allocations have been planned for.
