Stylle of text for scientific words in website

I'm helping design a website for a environmental conversationalists group. The website is intended to be accessible to a large audience, but does contain some scientific information (such as Latin names of plants).

As I've been told, the style for scientific writing is to have the first letter uppercase and the word italicized if it's a genus. Is this true? I personally think it stands out poorly, in the body of text, or especially in a heading or a caption to a picture. Examples are 'nepenthes' would appear as Nepenthes and 'isolepis' as Isolepis when using this convention.

In a nutshell, this can be seen as a conflict between technical correctness and aesthetics. What good is following a rule, if most people are unaware of the rule?