Giraffe Forum

I stand corrected. Drudge does have underscores all black

Gerry, wondering if you would agree that PDFs do make sense when you want to make a large document, such as an employee handbook, accessible online. If a possible scenario is that the employee will want to print the document, doesn’t a PDF provide a useful format?

The challenge is that people generally ‘park’ the cursor on the scroll bar and are not waving it around the page. This means that links that are not obvious may not be found.

If your links are simply to feed the hungry search engine monster then that’s fine, but if you want people to take action, why make them work to find the route to where you want them to go?

On the subject of pdfs I advise clients to present detailed content in pdfs - like course outlines, how-to instructions, specifications, etc. This is because this kind of document is often taken to a meeting to discuss or needs to be beside the screen to save clicking to and fro between the page or document being worked on and the instructions.

In addition the concept of a ‘free’ document is much more powerful when it comes as a pdf rather than a web page. Ask the sales site experts!

An employee handbook should be online as it’s a reference document and, with a bit of clever programming, it doesn’t need to be a single document, but a series of sections and pages accessible from a main menu.

A signpost on a motorway will be clear and direct, to help the driver get to where they need to go. Like top tasks, motorway signage uses a similar methodology, revealing smaller places as you get nearer to them, whilst batching them under the top level task e.g. M1 The North. If a signpost is not clear, the driver will miss it, with order signs, this could result in an epic task failure of a fine or accident. Just like you shouldn’t hide signs behind trees and bushes (to preserve the aesthetics of the environment) you shouldn’t hide sign posts on your website either. They need to be clear, direct, relevant, contextual and placed in places where the user can easily find them to continue their journey. A similar stance also includes avoiding ’signpost clutter’ - or a site full of so many links, that it becomes more confusing to the user. So, think clarity, relevance and the user journey.

I rally (or is it rail?) against PDFs all the time. The print mentality views the web as a delivery tool for documents instead of what it really is: a delivery tool for information.

I teach an internal staff course about how writing for a website is different to writing the same thing for print, but slapping a PDF online means using the print text and so renders everything I teach pointless. It also means that whatever constrictions of layout/design/re-writing were required to fit that text neatly into x pages of y dimensions are carried over unnecessarily into the ‘online’ version.

Geri makes the classic mistake of thinking that employees will want to print a ‘large document’ like the employee handbook but actually what employees want to do is look something up in the employee handbook. Finding the specific relevant info is much, much easier on a well-structured website than in a vast paper document. Plus, once printed out, that employee has a fixed version of that document which instantly becomes out-of-date the moment something, somewhere in the text is changed. Keeping information like that online - as a website/intranet, not a PDF - ensures that whenever an employee looks for information they get the most up-to-date version.

One of the reasons for the widespread obsession with PDFs is, in my experience, the old-fashioned approach that says: let’s produce a booklet/leaflet/brochure about X, and then let’s have stuff about X on the web. In other words, people too often base the online version on the existing print version, instead of extracting the print version from the constantly updated online version.

(In my view)
If you have a long document that contains important things that you want people to know, then the best thing yo ucan do is to it edit into a much shorter document.

That will make it chunking it out as as web/intranet pages a viable task. It wil also make scanning/reading it easier, and it will allow you to see stats for individual pages.

My experience has been that people who insist on having long documents as PDFs are much less interested in whether anyone actually reads the thing, once it is there.

A long document like an employee handbook is actually a collection of lots of short documents: a section on holidays, a section on pensions, a section on sick leave yada yada yada. In the pre-web days, it made sense to have all these things (that an employee might want at some time) bound together into a single volume, because giving people lots and lots of different leaflets can be very confusing. The employee knew that all the info they wanted was in one place.

But applying that same thinking to an online version is nuts. The ‘one place’ where all that info sits now is a section of the website, and within that the info should be presented in the best way possible, making it as easy as possible for people to find what they’re looking for. Keeping it all in a single online document is pointeless, unnecessary and frankly unhelpful, creating an extra barrier for anyone looking for specific information.

The only reason to do this is to match what’s in print, but websites don’t need to match what’s in print because they’re not aimed at people looking at the print version. Does the Argos website slavishly follow the page-by-page groupings of the Argos catalogue? No, because people with an Argos catalogue aren’t looking at the website and people looking at the website aren’t bothered about the catalogue.