The Print Test
This one's simple. Your site needs to be able to be printed out, page-by-page. Why?
Your site needs to be printable, because people are going to try to print it. Lots of sites fail this test. The ones that do tend to fall into two groups.
One group uses frames. For some reason, designers love frames. For reasons that are very obvious, visitors tend to hate them. One of the reasons is that it's hard to get the browser to print exactly what you want when the page that you see is developed in frames.
Give yourself ten points here if a random sample of ten pages on your site print easily and correctly using the standard "Print" command.
Right about now, some of you are saying, "Yeah, but they should . . .% Anytime you hear that magic "Sä word, or its cousin, "ought" you're probably making things more difficult than they need to be. And the basic principle of marketing in business is that the easier you make it for people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to do it.
Another principle is that counting on them to know how to do certain things often is a road to disaster.
Okay, we've talked about the frames page, what's the other group of folks, who tend to fail this test? That's the folks whose Websites are in colors that don't print well. I could go out and try to list all of them for you, but it really wouldn't be as effective as having you try to print out the pages.
How do you fix this thing? You can improve your score here if you tinker with your pages, re-designing them if they are in frames or tinkering with the color if it's a color issue, until they print cleanly. That's one way.
Another way is to have a separate "printable" page. That's gotten a lot easier to do, and it works very well. It's used a lot by high-content sites, such as newspapers that want the Web display to look one way that won't work
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