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Printing and Sending: the Two Things Users Want to Do
There's something you have to realise about the way users
interact with articles. To put it simply, they don't just want
to read them: they also want to print them out, and send them on
to their friends, family and colleagues. If you can make it
easier for them to do this, then your site will be a hit. But
how? Well, read on.
The Print and Send Links
At either the top or the bottom of your article, you should
offer clear 'print this article' and 'send this article to a
friend' links. It's up to you how you present them, but a
generally good place is underneath the byline and date, like
this:
Article Headline by Bob Smith January 1, 2010 Print this article
Send this article to a friend
If that looks messy, though, try moving the links to the end of
the article. You might even link to have the 'print' link at the
top of the page and the send to a friend link at the bottom.
You should also note that there are standard 'icons' (small
pictures) to represent printing and sending. Printing is a
picture of a printer (the same one used in word processors),
while sending is a picture of an envelope. Using these icons
will make it much easier for people to see what the different
functions of your website are. In many cases, you can even leave
out the text and just have the icons, or only have the text
appear when the user hovers over the icons - this saves on space
without sacrificing usability.
CSS for Printing
It's an unfortunate fact of the web that many web pages look
simply terrible if you print them as they are. No-one wants ads
on their print-outs, or blue-underlined links, or navigation, or
many of the other elements of a web page. For your visitors who
want to print, then, it's good to be able to remove these things
from your page when they press that 'print' button, before you
tell the browser to start printing.
How can you do this easily? Well, luckily, CSS has a built-in
mechanism for it. It lets you specify different styles depending
on media, with the default being media:screen - for printing,
you can use media:print, and add or take away different parts of
the style quickly and easily.
It's not difficult to switch between the screen and print CSS
stylesheets when that print button is pressed - all you need to
do is add a second stylesheet underneath your first one. That
means that your stylesheet declaration (in your HTML head) needs
to look like this:
The mystyle-print.css contains all the CSS that will be applied
to the document when it prints: nothing from mystyle.css will be
applied. Browsers should then apply this stylesheet
automatically when your document is printed - all that remains
is to link to javascript:self.print() for your 'print this page'
link.
Sending Pages
The best way to handle the sending of pages is to provide three
input boxes for the person doing the sending: one asking for
their name or email address, one asking for the recipient's
email address, and an extra box for any customised message you
might want to send.
All you need to do then is create an email from this
information: in PHP, for example, this is as simple as using the
mail() function. Include the information entered by the sender
in the message's 'from' field, instead of the name of your
website, and keep your own words to a minimum if the sender
wrote a custom message: it's much better for a message to look
like this:
Basically, emphasise the fact that it's from their friend, not
from your website, and you'll get far more people clicking the
link. It's also worth including the title and even the intro, as
well as just a link to the article, so the person involved is
more tempted to click it - after all, if their friend thought
they'd be interested, they probably will be.
