Every important page on your site should be printable. Visitors will want to print documents to review offline, to keep records of their purchases, or to take with them when they go shopping.
Making your Web pages printable is easy.
The first thing to remember is that you need to put the content that you want to be printable in the leftmost 540 pixels to 560 pixels of your page. Anything wider than that is likely to get cut off when it is printed. This means that if you have a large left navigation area, your main content area has to be small enough to avoid making the main area of the page too big to fit on a printed page. A left nav width of 120 pixels wide or less should allow your pages to print on most printers.
Many companies put information that is non-essential when printed in a column to the right of the primary content. This is a good place for links to related articles, advertising, and links that are only relevant online. It these items get cut off when printed, it doesn't affect the usefulness of the printout.
Another tactic is to use alternate pages for printing. To do this, your web content is stored in a standard web page version, and a printable version. If you use a content-management system, then you can easily generate multiple versions of your pages. If your site has web applications created by many different people, though, adding a secondary printable version may be more difficult. In this case, the best solution it to make the standard form of your web page printable.
Make Your Pages Printer-Friendly
- Keep information users may want to print in the left 540-560 pixels of your page. 560 pixels should keep the page around 7 3/4" wide. This should work fine for most printers. It also works better with A4 size paper, used in most areas of the world outside the US.
- Building fixed- width pages wider than this is fine if you have a good reason, but make sure that you keep the content readers will want to print on the left side.
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