Mark Morris Dance Group

For any arts organization, the challenge in Web site design is demonstrating its unique, creative je ne sais quoi while adhering to best practices that actually make a site functional. In the relentless pursuit of form, function often gets chucked out the window like a Hershey’s bar wrapper on a middle-school field trip. Many arts orgs, for instance, begin by building pretty sites in Flash that animate in neat ways but remain virtually impossible for search engines to crawl or visitors to navigate intuitively. MMDG has avoided the obvious pitfalls here and relied on big images, good content and functionality — and a simple, but striking, gray background to make the site work.