When M. Donald Blaufox, M.D., PH.D., chair of Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Department of Nuclear Medicine, noticed a lack of enthusiasm for medical museums in the United States, he decided to create one himself. Though he originally considered a physical museum or book to showcase his growing collection of medical artifacts, he soon realized that a web-based museum would not only allow his collection to continue growing without space limitations, but would also allow for easy indexing and searching of the items. The site, like the collection itself, will evolve over many years, and we are happy to be involved with this incredible collection of artifacts.

Like many a brick-and-mortar museum, we designed the site in white with minimal distraction from the exhibits themselves. This approach carries over into the user interface design, which was informed by Are Halland’s Core and Paths methodology of stripping a website of anything superfluous on the way to the meat of the matter. In this case, medical artifacts as illustrated through photography, the core of the site, have been floated to the top for immediate user access, doing away with a true homepage and the need to drill down to find what you’re looking for.

We created a flexible and dynamic publishing site using a customized version of ExpressionEngine Content Management System. ExpressionEngine is a robust PHP/MySQL solution that, because of its modular nature, can be readily customized as needed and is very accommodating of third-party applications. All menu and slide show animation is built using standard-based HTML/CSS and Javascript, rather than Flash. This increases search-engine optimization and is more compatible with mobile browsers, such as iPhone’s Mobile Safari.

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