Web Design

Use CSS for Print Friendly Pages

It used to be that if you wanted a print friendly page version of each page of your website you made one and blocked the search engines from indexing them as duplicate content by blocking them in your robots.txt file, but now you can get your printer friendly page with just a wee bit of CSS code and a print style sheet.

With all custom web sites that we design now, we include the CSS to create a printer friendly page, just by clicking print – no new URLs just smart coding. It’s a fairly simple thing to do and yet so very elegant and much appreciated by readers.

In our print friendly versions, we block out colors, navigation, and sometimes images. In our current site www.mccordweb.com and www.mccordwebdesign.com we do not use CSS print versions as these sites are older sites and we will be replacing them with new designs this year, but all new client websites have CSS print friendly pages.

If you have a website in design right now, make sure to ask your web designer will they be doing CSS print version pages for you as well.

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.