Two weeks ago when I was in Las Vegas attending CES (The Consumer Electronics Show) with a good friend of mine from Evident Productions, we came up with idea for a blog series. So over the next month or two I will be blogging about my experiences at the show from a little point of view than many blogs you may find that have talked about CES.

I will be doing this series as a multi-part series that focuses on design, quality and production side of the entire trade show experience rather than focusing on the products that were presented at the show.

That’s about it for now! Hope you’re having a great day where you are!

It’s been a long time since I printed a web page (partially because I’m cheap and don’t like changing ink jet cartridges). However, printing a page doesn’t have to be a pain if the designer took a little extra time and made a “print.css” stylesheet. Print.css when applied correctly can make a web page easy to read and ink efficient.

Let’s take for instance the 26AM blog which you’re reading right now. We’ve created a print.css file that does the following:

• Changes the background to white
• Uses Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif fonts
• Removes all menus, the search bar, sidebar, header images
• Adds print friendly titles and headers
• Adds copyright information and the date/time stamp.

The first step is instructing the browser to use Print.css when a person chooses to print the document. We added the following line to our HEAD tag.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.26am.com/wp-content/themes/26AM/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

Of course for your purposes, you’ll want to set the HREF to your newly created print.css file. The second step is filling in the Print.css file. Ours looks like this:

/* 26AM Print Styles */
@media print {
	body {
		font-family: arial;
		font-size: 11pt;
	}
 
	#header {
		display: none;
	}
 
	a, a:visited, a:active {
		color: #09C;
	}
 
	#printheader {
		display: block;
		background: #29ABE2;
		padding: 10px;
		margin: 1em 0 1em;
	}
 
	#printfooter {
	font-size: 10pt;
	color: #666;
	border-top: 1px solid gray;
	margin: 2em 0 0;
	padding: 1em 0;
	}
 
 	.breadcrumb {
		font-size: 9pt;
		margin: 0 0 1em;
	}
 
	img.authoravatar {
		display: none;
	}
 
	a.stbutton,
	h2.pagetitle,
	p.postmetadata,
	.respond,
	#respond,
	#sidebar,
	#footer {
		display: none;
	}
}

You’ll see that the majority of what we’ve done is hide things. You’ll also see that we are revealing things as well. We’ve hidden all the unnecessary information that we mentioned above, but then we revealed the printer friendly formatted information such as date and time stamp. Hope this has helped. If you’re working on a project for a client or for yourself, having a printer friendly version of the website can really show your attention to detail and care for the end user. Leave us a note and let us know if this has helped you.

• Showcasing our clients and the work we’ve performed for them
• Providing information about our services
• A simple quotation form
• Updated blog design to display our thoughts and musings
• Twitter feed in a more organized fashion
• Prettier more functional design.

Here’s what we came up with so far. Look for it soon live on our site!

So if you’re thinking about Web 2.0ing (not a real word) your company/site/brand, ask yourself a few questions:

• Will my company benefit from interacting with customers/members/clients through the web?
• Are my clients actually people who use the web to interact? (Most construction companies don’t use the web to conduct business)
• Are there better ways for me to drum up business/awareness for our company?

I’m not against Web 2.0, heck 26AM has jumped on the concept. I am however against trying to make something hip and trendy when it serves no purpose and in fact could potentially hurt a business.