PDFs and lazy web authors

Posted on 23. Aug, 2008 by Craig Killick in Web Design & Development

Have you ever being looking for some information on a website, you click and link and your PDF open dialogue comes up? No word of a warning, just a simple link like most of the other links of the site but it links to a PDF document instead of another web page.

This really annoys me, from both sides of the fence:

• As a website visitor, I may just want to skim through some information. I don’t want to have to open up Adobe Acrobat to read a document. It breaks the user experience of clicking through to the next page – it breaks my stride.
• As a marketer, PDFs are not as optimised as HTML can be. Yes, you can add meta data to them and yes, a search engine can list your PDF, but how much linkability is being lost?

So. Why do web authors do this? Well, I can only guess because it’s easy for them. “Yes, let’s save it as a PDF and lump on the web server”.

Websites rely on quality user experience, not ease-of-maintenance for the author.