::News You Can Use:: To PDF or not PDF?Adobe Portable Document Files (PDF) can bring your Word documents to the Web. But, they don't always offer a win-win situation.
:: For the Web Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, "PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed. But that is all it's good for. No matter how tempting it might be, you should never use PDF for content that you expect users to read online."
According to Nielsen's studies on Corporate Websites, forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages.
It's always a good idea to offer both PDF and HTML versions of documents your Web visitors might want to print. You can make both versions accessible from the same page.
Because your PDF files can take a few seconds to be downloaded and slow down the browsing of your Web users, you should always signal these bigger files by using an icon or the mention "PDF" in parenthesis.
If you have any questions on how to optimize your use of Adobe PDF files on your website, please contact us at info@yourwebmaster.ca
Published: 2004-05-31
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