Kelly Ferrigan | Professional Web Developer & Technical Writer

Date: January 28, 2023

Review of azdot.gov

URL: azdot.gov

Name of website: ADOT

Target audience: Arizona drivers and parents, all genders at least 15.5 years old, and Arizona pilots

Screenshot of the ADOT home page:

Type of navigation present: hierarchical

How the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity are used:

• Contrast: Variations of blue, orange, gray, and white are used on the page
• Repetition: Headings, links, and buttons on the page have similar shapes and formats
• Alignment: Page elements are vertically aligned in columns, with similar items grouped together
• Proximity: All similar content is grouped together throughout the page

Three improvements I recommend:

1. Change the color of links that have been clicked on to indicate visited/non-visited status.
2. Remove the diagonal stripe background behind the gray links to the left for better repetition.
3. There should be a year after the copyright symbol at the bottom of the page.

Date: January 22, 2023

Three Interesting Facts About the Web

Humans click on a webpage 100 billion times per day

This isn't something I ever thought of and seems like a huge number. Then I think of how many web pages I click on in a day and how many times I open a web browser in a day and it's a lot. According to Mohsin (2022), Google.com is visited more often than any other website, it is the most popular search engine, and people perform over 8.5 billion searches per day on it. That's such a huge number!

We have to rethink copyright because of the web

This is an interesting point because of how the web has extended what is protected by copyright and, with that, changed what can be used by others on their sites. According to the University of Texas Libraries' Copyright Crash Course (2022), with the creation of the world wide web, any work that is created or saved digitally gains an implied copyright. No additional paperwork, symbols, or process is required for copyright protections today. It's incredible to think how dramatically this has changed from the days when there was an official copyright process!

XML can mash data together

HTML connected form and content but XML separated them, so that XML content could be combined with other XML content somewhere else in a different form. As an example, Ort et al. (2007) describe the many websites that display a number of restaurants on a map, explaining that the list of restaurants and the map are XML content originating from two different locations. Mashups of XML data is incredibly useful for not only locating restaurants but also for locating houses for sale along with the details for each.

Sources:

Mohsin. M. (2022, January 2). 10 Google Search Statistics You Need to Know in 2022 [Infographic]. Oberlo. https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics

Ort, E., Brydon, S., \& Basler, M. (2007, May). Mashup Styles, Part 1: Server-Side Mashups. Oracle. https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/javaee/server-side-mashups.html

University of Texas Libraries. (2022, August 17). Copyright Crash Course: Content on the Web. https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/copyright/contentweb