Printer-friendly web pages

[altyfc]

Most designers design websites with specific screen resolutions in mind, but do they also design for printers? ie. so that the pages are print friendly?

I understand that you can make your website more printer friendly with CSS, controlling things like width, background colour, font, etc. CSS has its advantages because you can make just one page with one design, rather than a page and a print-friendly page, but of course it won't work on older browsers. But should web designers even be bothering with making sites printer-friendly, do you think? Afterall, a web site is meant for the web, no? But then there's the other argument that people sometimes prefer to read from a printed version... does it depend on the nature of the site and/or material as to whether it should be printer-friendly?

Aaron

[polarmate]

Aaron, it depends on who your target audience is, what type of a connection they use to access your web site and what their habits are.

On one of our web sites, we make most of our pages available in a printer friendly format where we eliminate all the borders and images. Our pages are long and a large section of our audience is on dial-up connections. They are also not particularly computer or internet savvy, so they prefer to see a long page which they can print out at one shot. Or read offline. They don't mind scrolling as long as it is all there and they don't have to click too many times and lose what they were just looking at! There is a lot of data on these pages that our readers take away for self-study as well as to offline discussion groups.

On our e-commerce site, we do not provide this service even though there is a wealth of information there. If a visitor does want to print it, they can either print it as is and run their ink cartridges dry or they can copy and paste the text into a text document and print it.

So the answer to your question is: it depends!