Colophon Page
Introduction
The goal of this final assignment is to inform my viewers how I attempted to make shanecarlsondesign.com the most user friendly possible. Before I ever created shanecarlsondesign.com, I had a very clear plan as to how I was going to make it the most visually appealing. But as I got further down the development path of shanecarlsondesign.com, I realized that my original plan was lacking usability. So I will attempt to explain how I accomplished the design you see now.
Web Standards
My biggest attempt to insure that shanecarlsondesign.com is user friendly is by making the all the pages that can be navigated to look exactly alike. In my research of successful webpages, I realized that repetition is part of what makes a webpage successful. Then in my CIT 230 class I was taught about web standards. So of those web standards these are the ones I followed:
- Navigation
- Unlike most navigation on the web, mine is positioned toward the bottom of the page.
- Even though the navigation is at the bottom, because it is introduced in that location at the home page and because it never moves on all the other pages, it works out nicely.
- Sub-Navigation
- To make sure that users were not being distracted from the visual content with a lot of text on the page, I found a sub-navigation tab that I could add to shanecarlsondesign.com.
- This sub-navigation tab allows users to navigate to an frame without being distracted.
- Footer
- My footer is typical to most footer seen on the web.
- One important difference is the fact that I included a disclaimer about how my site relates to Apple. I wanted to avoid any problems with that because I know that Apple is very particular about their brand.
- Links
- Any link that you'll find in shanecarlsondesign.com acts like a link. It changes color when you hover over it with a mouse and it's a color that contrasts with the rest of the page.
- Buttons
- There are a few button on my webpage but I have made sure that they look like buttons, to do that I put a bevel on all the images that are meant to be buttons.
Website Usability
Creating the above list of web standards took time. One thing I liked to do was ask friends, family and even strangers to go to shanecarlsondesign.com for the first time so that I could watch their viewing habits. This proved to be most useful when trying to make my webpage as good as I could make it.
Search Engine Optimization
Because shanecarlsondesign.com is highly visual, it was a bit difficult to do a lot with SEO. The best that I could do was repeat shanecarlsondesign.com or Shane Carlson Design over and over again. In the copy, the alt's, the title of the page anywhere that I could. I also created as legthy of captions for my content as I could so that those words could be searchable.
Return On Investment
I have tried to make shanecarlsondesign.com as interactive as I possible could. I wanted viewers to not only look at the content in my portfolio, but I want them to just try everything out. Javascript has been my hero for allowing this. If it weren't for all the hours I put into learning Javascript, shanecarlsondesign.com would not be near as fun to visit as it is now. I think viewers will keep coming back to my webpage to see what more I can do with it.