A Website Colophon — Documenting How Your Personal Site Is Made

A personal website often grows one quiet decision at a time. You change the font, replace a static generator, move to a smaller server, and eventually forget why any of those choices made sense. A website colophon gives those decisions a home: one modest page that explains how the site was built, what it values, and who helped make it possible.

What a website colophon actually is

The word colophon comes from publishing. In older books, a note near the end could identify the printer, typeface, place of production, or people involved in making the book. A web colophon applies the same idea to a website. It may list the software, hosting, typography, design choices, accessibility work, privacy practices, and licenses behind the pages visitors see.

It is not quite an About page. An About page introduces the person, organization, or purpose behind a site; a colophon introduces the site as a made object. Think of a restaurant menu and the small note that names the local farm, the ceramic artist, and the kitchen's approach. The meal remains the focus, but that note reveals the craft surrounding it.

A colophon also differs from technical documentation. It does not need to expose every deployment command or infrastructure secret. Its job is to preserve useful context in language that a curious visitor can understand.

Why a small personal site benefits from one

A colophon first serves your future self. Six months after a redesign, details that once felt obvious become surprisingly difficult to reconstruct. Recording why you chose a system can save more time than recording only its name. “Hosted on a home server to learn operations and retain control” tells a richer story than “Hosted on Debian.”

It can also help other builders. The independent web has always grown through people viewing source, borrowing patterns, and adapting ideas. A clear colophon turns invisible dependencies into signposts. Someone who likes your typeface can find it. Someone who needs a lightweight analytics tool can investigate yours. Someone learning self-hosting can see that a real site does not require an enormous stack.

Finally, attribution is a form of maintenance. Themes, icons, fonts, libraries, photographs, and snippets rarely appear from nowhere. Naming their creators respects licenses and makes later audits easier. Acknowledgment should not be treated like a box of spare cables pushed into a cupboard; it belongs somewhere visible and organized.

What is worth documenting

A useful colophon is selective. Start with the parts that shape the experience or reveal meaningful choices:

• Publishing system: the CMS, static site generator, or custom application that produces the pages.
• Infrastructure: a broad description of hosting, server software, CDN, or deployment method, without sensitive details.
• Design and typography: the theme, custom design, typefaces, icon sets, and visual influences.
• Content workflow: how articles are drafted, reviewed, translated, or archived.
• Accessibility and performance: important constraints such as semantic HTML, reduced motion, responsive images, or minimal JavaScript.
• Privacy: analytics, cookies, third-party embeds, and the principles used when choosing them.
• Credits and licenses: people, projects, and assets that deserve attribution.

You do not need every item. A one-page portfolio may need only a few paragraphs, while a long-running publication may benefit from dated sections. The right level of detail is the level you can keep accurate.

Describe decisions, not just products

Lists age quickly. A stack that reads “PHP, Nginx, MariaDB, Debian” says what exists today but not why it exists. Add one sentence of intent to the important choices. Perhaps PHP fits the hosting environment, system fonts reduce page weight, or a self-hosted analytics tool avoids sending visitor data to an advertising platform.

This makes the page useful even when the technology changes. Products come and go, but constraints such as ownership, simplicity, low bandwidth, repairability, and privacy form a continuous thread. A good colophon is less like a shopping receipt and more like a workshop notebook.

Honesty is more interesting than perfection. If the design began from a theme and gradually became custom, say so. If translations use machine assistance but receive human review, explain that boundary. A colophon is not a stage for pretending every pixel was invented alone.

Keep implementation details safe

Transparency does not require publishing an attack map. Avoid IP addresses, internal hostnames, database versions that are unnecessarily precise, dashboard paths, account names, secret management details, and backup locations. Do not publish configuration files merely to prove that the site is hand-built.

A safe statement describes the architecture at a useful distance: “The site runs on a Debian home server behind Nginx and is backed up off-site.” That is enough to communicate the approach. Private operational documentation can hold firewall rules, credentials, recovery steps, and network diagrams.

The same boundary applies to automation and AI tools. You can disclose their role without exposing tokens, private prompts, unpublished drafts, or personal data. Transparency should increase trust, not reduce security.

Give the colophon a durable structure

Publish the page at a stable path such as /colophon/, link it from the footer or About page, and use ordinary semantic HTML. A tiny footer link is enough; the page does not need to compete with the main navigation.

The implementation can be deliberately boring:

<footer>
  <nav aria-label="Site information">
    <a href="/about/">About</a>
    <a href="/colophon/">Colophon</a>
    <a href="/privacy/">Privacy</a>
  </nav>
</footer>

Inside the page, headings such as “Technology,” “Design,” “Content,” and “Credits” make scanning easy. Include a “Last updated” date near the top or bottom. If the history matters, keep a short changelog rather than silently rewriting the story every time the stack changes.

Treat it as a maintenance tool

A colophon becomes unreliable when it is written once and forgotten. Add it to the checklist for meaningful site changes. You do not need to update it after every CSS adjustment, but a new CMS, host, analytics system, primary typeface, or translation workflow deserves a revision.

A quarterly review is usually enough for a personal site. Open the page, test its links, confirm the named tools are still in use, and verify that license statements remain correct. This is similar to checking a smoke detector: the task is small precisely because it happens before confusion becomes an emergency.

The review may reveal dependencies you no longer need. An icon library used for one symbol, an abandoned analytics script, or a font with a complicated license becomes easier to notice when the stack is described in one place.

A practical outline to begin with

If a blank page feels intimidating, write five short sections. Begin with one paragraph explaining the purpose and values of the site. Name the publishing and hosting approach in broad terms. Describe the design and typography. Explain accessibility, performance, and privacy choices. Finish with credits, licenses, and the date of the latest revision.

That first version does not need to be definitive. A colophon can grow with the site. What matters is that it is specific enough to be helpful, restrained enough to maintain, and honest enough to reflect how the work is really done.

Conclusion

A website colophon makes the hidden craft of a personal site visible. It preserves technical memory, gives credit, helps fellow builders, and turns a pile of tools into a coherent set of decisions. More importantly, it reminds us that websites are made things, shaped by values as much as by software.

Start with the choices you would struggle to explain a year from now, then publish them at a stable URL. If your site already has a colophon, share what you include in it in the comments; your approach may help another person document their own corner of the web.