Colophon Page

A colophon page describes how a web site is constructed and can be arranged in a wide variety of ways. Your colophon page must contain a minimum of four sections: Web Standards, Usability, SEO and ROI. The web standards section must explain what standards you have used in building your web site and why. The usability section is going to describe how you have implemented the concepts from the Don't Make Me Think text. Be sure to be thorough in your explanation. The SEO section will explain the principles and techniques you have used to increase your site rankings in the Google search engine. Finally, the ROI section will describe how doing each of the three preceeding section will increase profitability for the site. The colophon page will be in xhtml format, and a link to the guide will be placed in the footer of each page in the web site.

Web Standards

I used two different web standards in my website, the first was XHTML 1.0. If you can see at the bottom of every page there is an xhtml validator. You can check every page and see that every page is validated. This shows that I use and follow the web standards of XHTML 1.0

The other 'standard' that I used was CSS 3.0 (I was planning on using CSS 2.1 but I found some really cool code that would only work with CSS 3.0) Currently there is NO validator for CSS 3.0 so unlike XHTML there is no way to validate my website to see if I adhere to the CSS 3.0 code. But if you have a 2.1 validator you can see it passes with several errors and those errors only exist due to the fact that there is CSS 3.0 code in there. I want my site to run smoothly as possible and this is a way in doing that.

Usability

Usability has been a concern during the developement of my website. I wanted to stick the guidelines that the book "Don't Make Me Think" outlines. It shows some very good basic principles that I have tried to implement in my website so that usability is very easy. Here is a list of several examples from the book about usability tatics:

  • Page layout- keep it simple and similar to other websites
  • Links- do they have a relevant title and looks like it can be clicked
  • Search- quick easy simple
  • Building websites because users scan the page not read it.
  • Creating a visual hierarchy with the typography and section layout
  • Reduce the amount of words and text are on the website
  • Easy to use navigation
  • Test the system for usability- I had my wife, friends and family look at it and give feedback.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I used several different things when I was considering SEO. I wanted my website to appear first anytime someone searches for Shaun Hutchings or something realted. So therefore I added these things into my website to help me recieve those results.

  • Meta Tag in the head element which gives you several options such as Keywords, Description and Author. There I put in things that will boost my site to the top for specific keywords that are being search in a search engine.
  • Title Tag in many of the elements. The title tags I put in all the links within my website and attached to every picture within my website. That way those keywords are found more often within the website.
  • I also have adhered to SEO rules that have but set up by Google and several other large Search Engine providers. If these rules are kept than my web site stays in the results.

You can see now if you do a search at Google.com for 'Shaun Hutchings' you will most likely see my website like first or second on the search results.

Return On Investment (ROI)

This is probably the most important part of the website. What is the profit from building this. This website returns a lot. It already has. Of course you have your monetary value of the website. Yes it cost money to put a website up but in reality the cost is worth something. Well using Google Adsense I have actually made both monetary gains and other value from this website. I have about broken even with cost, by what I have made off of advertisement. This is really good. And then we have to take into consideration the purpose of making the site is to get myself more visiblity in the electronic world. I feel that I have done that with my SEO and usability. I feel people can come and see things about me from what I have created at the website and the information that is in the website.