Colloidal lithography (CL) is widely used as a low cost and large-area deposition approach, alternative to the conventional small-area expensive lithographic techniques, for the fabrication of short-range (SR) ordered sub-wavelength metallic nanostructures. This paper contributes to the understanding of the impact of the fabrication protocol of a colloidal mask on the optical and sensing properties of SR-ordered nanohole (NH) distributions fabricated by CL in optically thin (20 nm thick) gold films. We consider polystyrene nanospheres (PS-NSPs) with nominal diameter of 80 nm, electrostatically adsorbed from a salt-free colloidal solution onto a polydiallyldimethylammonium (PDDA) countercharged monolayer. By avoiding the conventional polyelectrolyte multilayer and based on the interplay between the deposition times of both PDDA and PS-NSPs, we demonstrate effective simplification of the commonly applied …