Book Shepherd

In some cases offer both versions

If some site visitors want information on the screen and others want entire documents, offer both. Many sites do.

When you link to a PDF, tell people that's what they are getting and how large it is or how long it will take to download.

Figure 5-15 shows you how employees at the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration can choose to download a PDF of their entire web content standards or get an HTML page on specific topics in the standards.

SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 5

Here are key messages from Chapter 5:

• Break up large documents.

• Think "topics," not "book."

• Divide web content by

- time or sequence

- people

- type of information

- questions people ask

• Decide how much to put on one web page by considering

- how much people want in one visit

- how connected the information is

- how long the web page is

- the download time

- whether people will want to print

- how much they will want to print

• Think carefully about using PDF files for your web content.

• PDF is more of a distribution mechanism for paper documents than a good way of giving web content.

• PDFs are appropriate in some situations.

• But consider not using PDFs when

- people do not want the whole document

- people want to read from the screen

- your web users are not comfortable with PDF files or with downloading software

- accessibility is an issue

• In some cases, the best solution is to offer both PDF and HTML versions of your web information.

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