Is your site printer friendly? Anyone can go to this site, hit the print button, and print out the content. The problem is, and this is the case for most sites, you print all the content on the page, including menus. I was visiting this fishing site, Ontario Fishing, and they reminded me about something I need to do to this site. I need to make it more printer friendly.

Printer Icon

Next to all of the posts on the Ontario Fishing site they have two handy little icons so visitors can print or email the post to friends. Hit the print button, and now you can print article only information, and all that unnecessary stuff like the sites menu gets removed. Hit the email icon, and viraly promote your site. These are both great features for the user, and take up little space on the site. Definately a positive usuability design element.

Duplicate Content

Don’t mess up your site though. Google hates duplicate content, and if you are linking to printer friendly versions of your articles, make sure you use rel=”nofollow” in your link. Also make sure you robot.txt file says not to index those links as well. A great site design element doesn’t have to mean poor SEO.

WordPress

For those of you that use WordPress it as easy as installing this plugin: WP-Print