Creating Printer-Friendly Pages
By CleverSage | February 2, 2008
In addition to being a good feature from a usability standpoint, encouraging and enabling easy-to-print pages from your blog or site is a great marketing tool. If someone is interested enough to want to print your content, you should remove the obstacles in their way and makes your pages as easy as possible to print.
Things you need to consider when integrating printer-friendly pages:
- Formatting
Removing navigation from the top, sides and bottom. - Branding
If at all possible try and include your company name, logo and phone number, somewhere on the printable pages. - Images
If your site is chock-full of images or ads, try stripping out the unimportant graphics that don’t need to be printed. - Hyperlinks
When displaying hyperlinks in a printed document be sure to show the full path of the link so your visitor can visit that particular page in the future. - Colors
Try to make sure that wherever possible you are not using inverse colors (i.e. White on Black, Yellow on Blue). You should aim to have all the printer-friendly versions of your page black text on a white background. - Fonts
Studies have shown that Serif (Times New Roman) fonts are the easiest fonts to read on paper.
Integrating Printer-Friendly Pages Into Your Site
You have several options available to you to make your pages printer-friendly
- Create a printable page for each of your pages.
- Create a PDF document of the page.
- Use CSS
I HIGHLY suggest going the route of the CSS-styled printer-friendly pages. By using CSS over PDF’s or multiple pages, you avoid the duplicate content SEO issues and and you don’t have to update multiple pages each time you make a change.
Be sure to check out some of the links below for tutorials and plugins to get you going with printer-friendly pages.
By providing and allowing your website’s visitors print page on your site quickly and easily, you are one step closer to giving your visitors exactly what they are looking for.
Related Articles & Links
- CSS Design: Going to Print
- CSS media types and printer-friendly pages
- Printer friendly pages using CSS
- 10 Minutes to Printer Friendly Page
WordPress Print Plugins
Topics: Usability, Viral Marketing |