Printing the Web: harder than it should be
Posted 20 February 2007, by Aaron
Smashing Magazine has steadily earned its position as my most commonly visited design blog/resource over the last few weeks. Pretty much every article they write ends up in my del.icio.us favourites.
Their most recent posting, Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques, tackles one of my personal web design bugbears - sites that are not print-friendly. It seems pretty obvious to me - if users like an article, particularly if it’s a long article, they might want to print it. Yet a surprising amount of web designers focus purely on the on-screen layout and completely neglect the print layout.
How many times have you printed a page you like only for the navigation to take up half a sheet of paper, and the content you’re really interested in bleeds off the edge? If you don’t know what I mean, try printing from my site without clicking that handy print link at the bottom of each article. Looks awful doesn’t it?
I find this particularly annoying when doing my studies. I do a hell of a lot of research online and often need to print and reference what I find. Yet, half the time I can’t print. Why? It doesn’t have to be like this!
Making your site print-friendly not only conveniences your users who want to print your material, it also enables you, the designer, to control what your site looks like in print. You wouldn’t allow your on-screen site to look anything but perfect, so why allow your printed material to appear with the logo missing and the layout an unreadable mess?
So, to all you sloppy web designers out there, do your users and yourself a favour, and make your site print-friendly. If you own a WordPress blog and you’re lazy (like me), install a plugin now!
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Tags:CSS, Usability, Web Design
