What's a Colophon Anyway?
In book publishing, a colophon describes details of the production of a book: typefaces used, names of the designers, the paper, ink and details of the binding materials and methods. Today the word simply describes the resources used to create a web site.
Project Overview
The redesign for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics started in June 2004 by University Web Services. The goals of the redesign were to provide the school with a new, attractive online presence to draw prospective students, showcase faculty and their research, as well as provide much needed information to current students.
The Team
Cary Delmark directed the redesign project. Cary is the manager of University Web Services, a department created by UTD's Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost in 2003.
Cassini Nazir led the design of the site, including the site structure, visual design, navigation, digital imaging, and page production.
Haywood McNeill edited existing content for the site and produced original content, most notably the faculty, student, and dean profiles. In addition, Haywood also served as liaison between the web team and the school.
Alex De La Torre is the school's web developer who maintains the web site, assuming all post-launch responsibilities for the site.
Mike Watters created the PHP code that allows users to recommend pages to their friends and comment on pages.
Resources
BOOKS - To guide us through the web development process we used the methodology described by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler in their book, "Web ReDesign | Workflow that Works".
SOFTWARE - The team used Dreamweaver MX to code the site and designed the cascading style sheets (CSS) using TopStyleLite. Fireworks MX 2004 and Photoshop CS were used for layout, photo optimization, and icon creation. Editors of this site use Contribute 3, which has excellent CSS rendering.
PHOTOGRAPHY - Paul Talley began shooting on the UTD campus before he tragically died in a plane crash on October 19. Doug Hopfer, Paul's colleague and a highly recommended photographer, completed our photographic needs.
Accessibility
Cassini worked with Marilyn Bland, an Arts and Humanities graduate student at UTD, to make the web site more accessible for the hearing and visual impaired. The screen reader JAWS was used for testing. The site conforms to the state of Texas's Guidelines for Accessibility.
Web Standards
All pages should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2. We recommend Mozilla Firefox for web browsing, although the site renders appropriately with Internet Explorer 5.5+, Netscape 6+, Safari or a standards compliant browser.
- Updated: September 1, 2015