Benefits of Colony

Unique Benefits

Colony provides solutions and alternatives to many of the problems associated with content management systems and websites.

• Friendly Page Addresses
• Enforced Accessibility
• Search Engine Optimisation

Friendly Page Addresses

Many content management systems use numbers to identify the pages rather than names, ie.

While this is easy for a computer to understand it does make it difficult for users to know what a page is about. This is even truer of search engines that use the name of the page a part of the page ranking calculation. Colony dynamically makes page names as you save pages, and even ensures the structure of the site matches the structure of the page, ie.

This is all done automatically and requires no technical experience to create the pages, however if you want to take control Colony allows pages to use any address you specify and even give a page more than one address. This is especially useful if you want visitors to access pages that are deep in your site from newsletters or other marketing streams.

Enforced Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act asks all companies to make reasonable efforts to provide accessible services, this includes website accessibility.

Colony uses a three step approach to ensuring accessibility:

• Encouragement
• Prevention
• Correction

Encouragement

Visitors with disabilities get the best experience when content has been written with them in mind, putting care and attention in to the content and explaining any unusual terminology and acronyms. Colony encourages users to add this additional content and quality to their site, ie.

• Insert images without a description
• Provide definitions for acronyms
• Provide definitions to abbreviations

Prevention

The rich text editor that is used to create content looks and feels much like Microsoft Word, however some features have been removed to prevent accessibility issues, for example users can not:

• Change the colour of text
• Underline text

Correction

Colony checks the pages are accessible and ensures the pages use valid HTML. Each page is automatically scanned for invalid HTML and automatically repaired, cleaning the HTML while removing invalid code. This is especially important as the code created by word processing software is notoriously badly coded and full of accessibility issues.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engines use a number of different techniques to determine what a page is about and where to rank it in comparison to other websites. A number of techniques used in Colony naturally improve the search engines understanding of the website and therefore its ranking under those terms, including:

• Every page of has keyword and description metadata
• Page - page basis metadata can be overwritten for more accurate listings
• The site and page is hierarchical with all navigation and structure reflecting this