Living online as much as we do, we don’t often think about how our web site translates offline. Yes, people still print web pages for later offline reference.
How does your site appear when printed? Is the text too small or formatted poorly? Does a lot of worthless information wind up on the page? If you don’t know, go print up a couple pages of your site right now and tell me if that’s satisfactory to you.
Creating printer-friendly pages is relatively easy with CSS. With a properly coded printer-friendly style sheet you can make sure your logo is nice and big, navigational elements are removed (they can’t click paper!), the text is a large readable size, and other unrelated elements are eliminated from the paper copy. If you’re printing product pages, be sure to print up all the image variations full size, not just thumbnails.
While you may not get a whole lot of people printing your web pages, you don’t want to annoy those who do. They are still potential customers, and this is a clear sign of wanting to engage. As with all things in web marketing, we want to make it easy and pleasant. Printers not excluded.