Transitioning Your Printed Materials to the Web – Part 1: Layouts

photo credit: Erathic Eric

By Matt Cook
Point Click Media

If your business is looking to start leaving a footprint on the web, you should know that it’s not uncommon to start by using existing branding and materials to create a website. Let’s face it, we all have budgets and unless your business is brand spankin’ new or growing money on trees, doing an entire branding overhaul just to put together your first website can be overkill. Chances are there’s a lot of value in the materials that you already have, so transitioning those very items to the web makes sense.

There are some things to consider, though, when bringing printed literature to the web. In this series of articles we’ll look at 5 things you should keep in mind when crossing the print and web worlds.

Learning About Layouts

In print, the designers’ layout restrictions tend to be focused mostly on bleed and cut/fold lines. You have a predetermined canvas size to work with but as long as you follow your printer guidelines and keep readable texts a sufficient distance from any of the cut or fold areas you’re essentially free to do what you want with the canvas.

With the web however, there are many more restrictions to deal with. First, due to the variance in all of the different brands and sizes of computer monitors, you now have to deal with a slew of different canvas sizes all at once. In addition, since web pages are scrollable, you could have pages of text that go on for quite a while. Making sure the design of your website can accommodate these technological barriers is important for achieving brand unity.

Next, we have the issue of those pesky little things called ‘search engines’. You may or not be aware, but search engines are rather important. Whereas with printed brochures or business cards you can physically hand them out to people, on the web you rely on search engines to do that for you. Making sure that the content of your website is structured well enough to be able to be found by search engines is not necessarily as easy as it sounds either. The print world allows a designer to do all kinds of funky graphical layouts like using angled, curved, or overlapping text, etc., but on the web everything is read in good old fashioned straight lines. Keep in mind that all of the cool text effects that were done for your printed literature will either need to be stripped down or become part of your website’s imagery, and text found in imagery is not indexed by search engines.

Believe me, web designers have been pitchforking and torching their way through the streets of the internet for years trying to get these standards updated and we’re making progress, but new technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t yet fully supported by all internet browsers. Until a technology is adopted universally there will always be hurdles to overcome in making web layouts more versatile. Web designers and developers still need to plan for browsers that don’t support these features.

Next week we’ll look at a reversal of roles, so to speak, and talk about resolutions.