Since you will be promoting a product or service, you will need a killer sales pitch and website content to get your readers interested in the product, convince them that they cannot live without the product, and to keep them coming back to your website time and time again for more recommendations and your useful content, which will get them clicking on your links once again. Although many affiliate companies only give you money off of the first sale you make from each customer, you have the option of promoting a good range of companies so that you can still make a profit off of your returning customers.

If you cannot write this kind of content of your own, there are many ways to pick up free or paid content to place on your affiliate website. There are many reasons why paying for such articles would be to your advantage. First, you will be able to tell the writer exactly what you want, what product you are trying to sell, and what direction they can go in to keep your readers interested and informed. On the other hand, when you search for free content, you are limited to what is already out there. Secondly, you will own the copyright to this content. That means that no one else can reuse it without your consent. If you opt for free content, you will be sharing that content with an unknown amount of other affiliate websites, plus the original author will be able to place their byline at the bottom of the article which could result in them stealing your traffic.

There are many products that have nice affiliate commission rates for those who know how to pre-sale their product and deliver click through customers who are ready to buy. As long as you choose to promote a product or service that can be very useful to a wide variety of people, then pre-selling your chosen company may not be that hard at all. The key in this situation may likely be getting those customers to your website so that they have a chance to see your recommendations and click on your affiliate links.

If you would like to learn more about affiliate marketing please click here

The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.

A website’s navigation is one of its most important parts. Sure, your users mostly come in through search engines now instead of via your homepage, but how can they get from whatever page they’re on to any other page they might want to go to? The limited space available at the top and sides of most web pages (at least when compared to the amount of content many contain) makes good navigation design difficult, but vital. Here, then, are five principles of effective navigation.

1. Don’t Be Original.

What? Don’t be original? What kind of advice is that? Well, if you spend any time visiting sites on the web, you should realise that it’s better advice than it might sound.

Let’s say you’ve just landed at some website for a search. You read a bit, you’re interested, but you’d like to know more about what this website is and why it’s here – basically, can you trust it? If you’re anything like me, you look around for a navigation link called ‘about’, ‘about us’, or something similar. Calling this link something else – ‘philosophy’, for example – will only confuse your visitors, and make them less able to find what they’re looking for. However much you might dislike the conventions of the web, you have to accept that we’re stuck with them at this point, at least if you want your website to be as usable as it can be.

2. Clicking the Logo Always Goes Home.

As a corollary to the above advice, it is extremely important to make sure that clicking your website’s logo will take a visitor back to your home page. I recently visited a website where clicking their logo caused a pop-up window to open, describing the logo. Do they really think that was what I wanted? Why on earth would anyone click on the logo to learn about it? That kind of thing is just bad navigation design.

People treat the logo-home link as a lifeline in the same way that they do the Back button: you break it at your peril.

3. Always Include Search.

Often, visitors can’t be bothered to search through your menu systems for what they’re looking for, especially if you have a large website. This fact makes it all the more important that you provide a search box right there on the navigation bar. No, not a link that says ‘search’ – an actual input box where your visitors can type, with a button next to it labelled ‘Search’.

People have been to enough websites to know what to do with a box like that, to the point where they even get upset if they can’t find one. Oh, and make sure that pressing the enter key after typing in the box takes them to the search results page.

4. Highlight on Hover.

When someone is hovering over part of your navigation system, you need to highlight the option they’ve got selected, so that they know where they are. Every non-web navigation system you’ve ever used no doubt does this, so there’s no reason why websites shouldn’t. You don’t want your visitors to be guessing what their clicks are about to do – you want them to be absolutely certain.

This principle is even more important in navigation that has more than one level (that is, where you can follow an arrow to get to a sub-menu). You’ve got to keep both the name of the sub-menu and the selected item on the sub-menu highlighted: if you don’t, visitors are likely to forget which sub-menu they selected, or not realise that they accidentally selected the wrong one.

5. Use Breadcrumbs.

Finally, if you have pages nested deeply in a navigation hierarchy, make sure you offer ‘breadcrumbs’ to let visitors know where they’ve come from. For example, a set of breadcrumbs for this article might look like this:

Articles > Web Design > Navigation > The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation

In this case, clicking on ‘Articles’, ‘Web Design’ or ‘Navigation’ would take you to indexes for those categories, containing sub-categories and perhaps more articles. For examples of breadcrumb navigation in action, take a look at the big search directories like dmoz.org and yahoo.com.

Logos are difficult to design – if you don’t think they are, then the chances are that you have a bad one. Every website needs a logo, and you should lavish a lot of time and attention on yours.

Your Logo is Your Face.

When visitors happen across a website that they haven’t seen before, one of the first places they look is at your logo – and that’s when they start to form impressions of you. A good logo can make or break trust in your site, and be a big factor in whether anyone takes you seriously. Branding experts know this: logos can produce positive reactions (like recognition), and negative ones (like revulsion), but both are equally strong. Having a bad logo is, effectively, like having an untrustworthy-looking face.

Keep Pictures Simple.

If you do include an image in your logo, keep it to one, and keep it to simple shapes. You don’t want your logo to become ‘busy’: just suggest what you’re getting at, instead of pasting in a full-colour photograph of it. In fact, you should keep your logo to as few colours as possible, if you want it to make an impact.

Typography is Important.

Don’t let anyone deceive you into thinking that the most important thing about a logo is how many little shapes and pictures it has in it. What draws visitors’ eyes about logos is the typography: the font on the words.

Unfortunately for logo design, there are a hundred or so fonts that come with Windows and Office, and they’ve become overwhelmingly common in amateur logos. You’re never going to be taken seriously if your logo appears in Times New Roman, or Verdana, because everyone else’s is too.

So where can you find a less-common font. Well, take a look around sites like fonts.com and typography.com for a start. Personally, I often like to use fonts that I’ve seen in advertisements and found appealing: you can identify any fonts you can scan using a service like WhatTheFont (www.myfonts.com/whatthefont) – it will take a look at the letters and tell you which font you’ve found.

Of course, commercial fonts can be expensive. Don’t pay ridiculous amounts, but don’t be afraid to pay a little: the chances are that you’ll be getting a much better font than you would be otherwise.

Avoid Clichés.

Finally, whatever you do, please avoid the painful cliché logos that are so common on the web. To help you out, here’s a quick list of logo types to stay away from:

Decade-linked logos. Please don’t make your logo look like something from the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, unless one of those decades is directly relevant to your site. If you just do it for no reason, it’s a cliché.

Spirals. Putting spirals in logos has been done to death – no matter what variations you might be able to think of on it, they’ve been done. Spirals are nice, appealing shapes, but simply too common in logo design to consider.

Animals. Putting an animal (or a silhouette on an animal) into your logo might look nice, but the chances are that there are already plenty of people out there using your animal. Especially if you’ve had the ‘original’ idea of combining a rabbit and a hat to imply that your product is ‘magic’.

Letters making faces. Painful in every case, and yet getting more common all the time. Please resist the urge to draw a little curve under two Os to make a smiley face. Please.

Letters making punctuation. Like the faces, but worse. How many more Is turning into exclamation marks do we have to endure? Just don’t do it.

Swooshes. The king of the clichés, the swoosh is at the point where using it in your logo will get you mocked. A swoosh is a curved line running across your logo – some say it’s now the most common logo device in the world. I’m sure you can think of something better.

There are a lot of web servers out there. Whenever you go to a website, you’re downloading it from a web server. When you pay money to a web host, what you’re really doing is renting a space on their web server. The Internet consists of millions of computers networked together, but it’s the servers that are providing all the information that makes up the web – you can’t have a website unless it’s on a server.

What is a Web Server?

A web server is really just a powerful computer – they use the same kinds of processors and memory that normal computers use, but they have more of it. Servers usually run a Unix or Unix-like operating system like Linux or BSD, but they can just as easily run Windows.

What makes these computers servers isn’t their hardware – it’s the software they run. Web server software includes the HTTP server itself, as well as databases and other things that are needed to make a web server work however it needs to. This is why different hosts offer different features: they have different programs installed on their servers.

Web Servers Serve Files.

The role of the web server, at its most basic level, is to send people your files over HTTP. It has a hard disk (often more than one) and stores your files like any other computer – if you don’t upload a file called ‘index.html’, many servers will list all your files for you instead of providing a web page. It’s the replacement of the index.html (named because it is supposed to be an index of files) that creates the illusion of everything on the server being one ‘web site’, instead of a set of files linked together.

Web Servers Run Scripts.

Of course, web servers don’t always just serve the same files over and over again. Sometimes they need to insert other information into pages, especially information that comes from databases. This is done with scripting languages like PHP and Perl – the server is told that it should give files that end in .pl or .php to the appropriate script interpreters, and these interpreters then tell the server what to send to the browser. This means that dynamic websites can often be slow, as the server is having to produce a different page for each visitor.

Virtual Servers and Dedicated Servers.

When you buy web hosting, though, you’re not necessarily getting a whole server to yourself – in fact, the chances are that you’re not, unless you’re paying lots of money. Instead, you’ll be sharing a server with the hosts’ other customers. You might not realise this, since the server doesn’t appear to have anything on it that isn’t yours, but the other customers are simply being hidden from you – you’re using what is known as a ‘virtual server’.

For small websites, there isn’t really any option other than virtual servers: they’re a great idea for letting resources be shared among lots of websites that don’t use much of the server’s power or space. If one of the sites does start growing, though, you might find your website slowing down. Oddly enough, this fact means that it’s often better to find a host that offers price plans with limits instead of one that offers ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth to each customer – your website will be much faster at the ‘limited’ host.

More Than You’d Think.

One thing that people don’t often think about is that there’s more than one web server program out there. It’s not really visible to visitors, since they all do basically the same thing, but there are lots of servers available, and they’re all quite different in the way they work. There are three main groups:

Apache. The open source Apache software is the most popular server software out there, with around 70% of the market share.

Microsoft servers. Microsoft are responsible for the various versions of IIS (Internet Information Server) and PWS (Personal Web Server), which altogether have around 20% of the market.

Sun servers. Sun produce lots of servers, most notably the Netscape-branded ones. The market share of these servers depends on whether you count all sites (making it 3%) or just the actively maintained ones (in which case it drops to less than 1%).

Source for statistics: netcraft.com.

Other servers available are mostly ‘simple’ servers that don’t have all the somewhat unnecessary features of these servers, such as thttpd (the ‘t’ is for tiny or turbo). There are literally hundreds of them, but they have mostly negligible market share.

Flash is a Plugin.

Flash isn’t integrated with any web browser – instead, it’s available as an installable plugin. This has a lot of downsides. The first time someone views something that users Flash, they’re asked to install the Flash plugin – this takes time and is annoying, especially considering that Flash plugin isn’t available for all browsers. After that, every time some Flash content appears, the Flash plugin has to be loaded into the browser before the content can even begin to be loaded, losing a vital few seconds.

Flash is Slow to Load.

Once the plugin itself has loaded, the next step is for it to load the Flash movie in question. Because Flash movies are typically so heavy in images and animation (that is, after all, the point of them), visitors will often end up spending a considerable amount of time being forced to stare at a ‘loading’ graphic. This is supposed to be the web, not a PlayStation – no-one wants to watch your site load.

Flash Makes Sound.

Flash upsets users because they generally have no way of knowing that it’s going to make sound – many users disable all their browser’s sound functions, not wanting random websites to be able to make sounds at them, but Flash sound still gets through, since it’s a plugin and doesn’t obey these settings. Flash is part of the reason why users end up browsing the web with their speakers turned off altogether – people just hate having unexpected sound forced on them, and they have no way of knowing whether your Flash website might suddenly start making some.

Flash is Often Unnecessary.

Because Flash lets you make little animations, many websites use it for things that are completely unnecessary and un-interactive, but that they think look ‘cool’. The classic example of this is the web crime of the Flash intro: a useless piece of Flash that visitors have to sit through before they get to a website, usually saying and doing nothing useful whatsoever. Using Flash for unnecessary things is actively user-hostile, and many users have come to associate its use with that mentality.

Flash Breaks URLs.

If you let visitors navigate around within a Flash movie, that navigation isn’t saved at all. If they go to another site and come back, or even just press the ‘Refresh’ button, they’ll lose their place entirely, and have to start from the beginning again. This isn’t good if they found a particular piece of information or picture – they’ll be annoyed at having lost it.

Flash Breaks Right-Click.

Users like to be able to right-click, to print what they’re looking at, or save it, or copy it to the clipboard – not to mention all the extra functions that they might have installed on that menu. Right-clicking on a Flash-based website, though, gives a right-click menu of things related to Flash, like whether the movie should display in high or low quality. Users just aren’t interested in this menu, and are upset that they can’t get their normal one back. This is an especially large problem for users that like to have more than one window open at once by using right-click followed by the ‘Open in New Window’ function.

Search Engines Can’t Read Flash.

Finally, perhaps the most convincing argument against Flash: it’s entirely invisible to search engines. Text you put in a Flash movie doesn’t exist, as far as search engines are concerned. It’s closed off from the rest of the web and unfindable by most of your potential visitors. That surely can’t be good.   ]]> http://sandtmarketing.com/articlemarketing/the-case-against-flash/feed/ 0 http://sandtmarketing.com/articlemarketing/10-easy-ways-to-promote-your-website/ http://sandtmarketing.com/articlemarketing/10-easy-ways-to-promote-your-website/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:36:37 +0000 Claire http://sandtmarketing.com/articlemarketing/?p=496 10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website

Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem, I’ve compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.

1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn’t live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on ‘lifestyle’ cable channels that show programmes about moving home.

2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.

3. Give Out Leaflets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.

4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.

5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?

6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums.

7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you’re trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.

8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ – make sure your blog has something interesting to say.

9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap – indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.

10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.

The first rule in marketing your web hosting and development business is to tailor your marketing for your target market. For example, if you are targeting programmers your marketing and sales copy will be much different than if you are targeting local “mom and pop” business owners. 

In your marketing, you may be appealing to:

• Web Developers/Programmers

• Personal/Home Users

• A particular geographical area

• Corporations

• Home Offices

• Specific industry segments (Attorneys, Publishers, etc.)

• A combination of the above

In general, small business owners will not respond well to overly technical information. If you talk about MySQL, PHP etc., you will just make their eyes glaze over. They want to know the benefits of getting a website in terms of profit and expense. You need to find out from them how much a new customer is worth to them and then show them that the small investment in a website will pay for itself many times over in new customers and increased satisfaction among existing customers.

Web programmers on the other hand, will want to know every last detail of the technical specifications and tools offered. If you want to appeal to them you will want to go over all the included features, software, and tools in great detail.

You can segment your market even further and develop an offer that will be irresistible to a specific industry segment, such as:

• Restaurant Owners

• Attorneys

• Dentists

• CPA’s

• Retail Store Owners

• Insurance Companies

If you develop a web services offer for a specific industry segment, your chances of making the sale are much greater because they will see that you specialize in providing custom services just for them. 

For example, you could setup a site called “TheRestaurantHost.com” and build it around the theme of providing web packages for restaurants. You might focus on how they can have their menus and gift certificates online… provide graphical maps to their location… etc. (BTW, as of this writing, the domain name “therestauranthost.com” is available…)

Or perhaps you want to cater to Insurance Companies. You would focus on how you will provide them with forms so customers submit claims online, or get rates and quotes right on their website. The more you tailor a solution to a specific industry segment, the more clear the benefits are for your prospects, and the easier it is to sell.

The latest projection for the hosting business, IDC’s U.S Web Hosting Services Market Forecast, projects a compounded annual growth rate of roughly 30% from 2006 through 2008. The most exciting area of growth, is the SME market (small to medium sized businesses with 1 to 99 employees). 

That’s where you come in  

The small business market is projected to grow to 10 million businesses by the year 2008. Small businesses generally like to outsource because they don’t have huge, in-house IT departments. Of the millions of small businesses around the world today, the majority still do not have any kind of meaningful web presence (their own domain name, domain email, and a quality design and web development plan).

Whether you plan to provide design and hosting services together — or focus just on hosting services — there is a lot of money to be made in the hosting market. The nice thing about hosting is it provides a residual income base. Take a look at the following chart to see the long term potential of building a modest hosting portfolio.

Small Hosting Portfolio (10 accounts per month)

Medium Hosting Portfolio (30 accounts per month)

As you can see, the long term potential is enormous — especially when ValueReseller helps you keep your overhead to the bare minimum and allows you to easily scale as you grow.

Now that you see the huge potential, it’s time to warn you that getting achieving numbers like those above, is not necessarily easy. It is a competitive business and there are challenges. The key is to understand the marketing side in addition to the technical side. 

At ValueReseller, we are committed to providing the technical tools and resources that will keep you a step ahead of the competition. We are also committed to providing you with the important marketing information that will help you grow your business to whatever level you desire. Please spend some time reviewing the other articles in this marketing center and check back often as we continue to expand this area with the sole purpose of helping you sell more websites!

Before you can get a website up and running, you need to have a place to put it. Paying for web hosting is, basically, like renting a small amount of space on someone’s server and paying what it costs them to send your web pages to your customers. Fortunately for you, though, web hosting has never been cheaper.

Domains and Hosting Together?

Many domain name companies have taken to offering you hosting when you buy your domain from them. This is generally an expensive option, and a bad idea – you’ll be getting few features compared to what you’re paying. Few people who are serious about web hosting get it from the same place they get their domains.

So Where Should I Start?

Well, that all depends on what your website is going to need. How many visitors do you expect to have? Are you going to have lots of large graphics on the site? Do you have a lot of articles or products that you want to put in a database? Do you want to have an email address at your website (yourname@yourdomain.com)? On and on it goes. Each host you look at will offer you different combinations of features at different price points, and finding the one that’s right for you can be quite a task. Here’s a technical-to-English guide to what you should be looking for.

MB storage. The more MB of storage you have, the more you can put on your website. For most websites, this number can be really very small without it being much of a concern – the pages would be too big for anyone to download and see before they’d be too big to store. You only really need to worry if you’re planning to put something apart from plain pages on your site. If you want to make a gallery for your digital photos or let people download ebooks from you, for example, this number needs to be higher.
GB bandwidth per month. This is a limit on how much data your website can transfer each month. For small websites, you don’t need to worry too much, but as you get more visitors the amount you need will increase sharply, especially if each one looks at lots of pages or downloads large files from the site. The amount of bandwidth your site needs is generally considered to be the deciding factor in how ‘big’ it is, and how much it will cost you.

MySQL databases. The number of databases your website will have to store things in. It will make it much easier for you if you have one. Don’t pay more to get extra, though: one database is all you need. It’s worth noting that if your host may offer some other kind of SQL instead of MySQL (for example, PostgreSQL). You should usually avoid anything apart from MySQL, unless you know what you’re doing.

PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby. These are all scripting languages, used to write your website. You should make sure your host offers the languages that any software you plan to use is written in. If you don’t have specific requirements, then you should be fine with just Perl and PHP.

Subdomains. These allow you to split your website into more sections than just ‘www’ – you might decide, for example, that you would people to be able to go to ‘shop.yourdomain.com’ and ‘news.yourdomain.com’ and see pages there. You don’t really need these, though, as doing the same thing with subfolders (‘www.yourdomain.com/shop’) is usually just as effective.

FTP accounts. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is what you’ll use to upload your website to your host. You’ll always get one of these. The only situation when you’ll need more is if you want to let someone alter things on your site without giving them the master password.

POP3 accounts. POP stands for ‘Post Office Protocol’, which is just fancy-speak for email. The more POP3 accounts you get, the more email addresses you can have: useful if you want to have sales@yourdomain.com for new customers and support@yourdomain.com for existing ones, for example.

More and more websites, especially business ones, seem to adding PDFs to their website – yet users are united in their hatred of them. How on earth did this happen.

Why PDF?

PDFs are marketed as an easy way to re-use print designs and content online: all you do is export the data from your desktop publishing program as a PDF, throw it on the web for download, and you’re done. It avoids the whole question of web design, or of having to break up the data into sections and create links between it. What’s more, it preserves things like pictures and diagrams intact, so, in theory, nothing is lost in the transition.

This appeals a lot to big companies that don’t want to pay two people (one for print, one for the web), when they see a way to make one do. The saving on web layout looks real to them, because they’re never going to be on the receiving end of the content. In short, the reason people use PDFs is that they don’t understand the web.

They Require a Plugin.

Like Flash, PDFs require a plugin, with all the downsides that involves. Users have to go and download the plugin (assuming there is a version for their platform and browser at all), and then come back to your site – that is, if they remember.

However, the PDF plugin is even more painful than most. Why? Simply because it takes a ridiculous amount of time to load. It actually has enough time to pop-up a splash screen and explain which parts of the program are loading – this can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds, and there’s no way to cancel it once it starts. It’s painful enough for most users that opening a PDF unexpectedly will cause them to say “argh no, a PDF!” and leave the computer in disgust, only coming back later to close what loaded.

The Layout is All Wrong.

Even if you know you’re loading a PDF and you’re happy to sit and wait, what you end up with in the end still annoys you, more often than not.

PDF layouts are nothing but ‘virtual pages’: they’re laid out entirely wrong for the screen. You can’t see an entire page on your screen at once without making the text tiny, which forces you to scroll. Anyone who’s ever tried to scroll a PDF with columns – scroll down, then back up, then down again… – will know the pain this causes.

Opening a PDF is most often an experience of scrolling past a massive table of contents (that hasn’t been made into hyperlinks to the relevant pages), and then trying in vain to find what you were looking for somewhere among the pages. The scrolling in the program is painfully slow, and most of the time you end up giving up pretty quickly.

The Reader Often Crashes.

As a final blow, Adobe’s PDF reader program, for all its slowness, isn’t even all that stable: it has a tendency to crash people’s browsers after a while, especially if they try to use any of the browser’s buttons. This upsets your visitors to say the least, and they’re not likely to come back to your site again after their browser crashes because of your PDF.

But They’re Good for Printing.

However, there is one area in which we have to give PDFs some credit. It’s their original intended use: to preserve print layouts over the web so that they can be used for printing. If you want to give your visitors something that is best printed out on paper (a complicated graphical page, for example, or an official form), then the best way to make sure that it survives the journey across the web intact is to let them download it as a PDF.

What does all this mean? Well, really, it means that unless you want to upset your visitors, the only time you should have PDFs on your site is when they’re linked to like this: ‘Download PDF (for printing)’. Any content you put in a PDF should always also be available as HTML.