Many people prefer reading from paper
It always struck me as silly to print websites on paper. But in my search for an interaction design internship I experienced that printing websites isn’t that silly after all. If you offer a PDF version of your website, you’re actually offering your users the most important content in a way that they can print and save easily. From my experience their are still a lot of people who prefer reading from paper, including me.
The effort is on the user
Of course their are some possible reasons that it’s not common to download a website in PDF format. Dynamic content being the most obvious one. But this can be either be solved by only showing content that won’t change often or by dynamically generating PDF’s, which is a bit more tricky. Well designed websites can be manually printed, page by page. But isn’t this putting the effort on the user? You, as website owner, should make a selection of the most important content that is most likely to be printed and create a PDF of it.
I’m waiting for ‘prefer reading from paper?’ buttons to arise…
michiel
16 May 2007
Why dont look at print css stylesheets then
rogier
16 May 2007
Print stylesheets are a good option, but they are still putting the effort on the users side.
SK
7 August 2007
Most companies have printed documentation when you want to know more about them. Why print their website on a crappy inkjet printer while you can just call them to send you their presentation/documentation/ etc…