4.02 Offline

It is easy to get involved in developing online services but don't forget that a percentage of your clients are not online. As you create material for your web site you should look for ways to present the equivalent information in other ways.

The same but different.
Web pages, viewed on a computer monitor, have different design criteria to pages designed to be read as a leaflet or poster. Simply clicking the “Print” button in your web browser rarely produces a satisfactory presentation of a web page.

Web to print
Let's assume that you have a web page which you want to share with visitors to your surgery – or a newsletter which you want to put online – what do you need to look out for?

Chunking
The online version needs its text broken into manageable chunks – blocks of a few lines each. This isn't because web users have a shorter attention span – its to help them keep their place as they scroll your page upwards in their browser window. If you are creating a print version of a web page you will probably be able compress several web pages into one printed page.

Font
Some fonts work better on screen while others are more effective in print. As a generalisation, sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica are easier to read from a screen while serif fonts like Times New Roman or Bookman are more effective on a printed page.

Images
Ideally, images should be created at different resolutions depending whether they are going to be displayed online or are destined to be printed. Web pages need images optimised to load rapidly and are displayed onscreen at around 72 image elements per inch. For print it doesn't generally matter if images are large but their resolution should match the capability of the printer you use. This will be hundreds of image elements per inch.

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