You want to make sure that your fax, phone number(s) and address is on every page you write and put on the web. Especially if you're going to give them the opportunity to print your information

Part of the inspiration I received to write this article stems from discussions I have had with associates and customers about abandoned shopping carts. You know - these are the folks who were going to buy from you but for some unknown reason backed out of the ordering process at the last minute. Why?

There are several opinions as to why.  I don't really care why. The fact is - they backed out and you lost the sale. But even if they backed out, it doesn't mean you have to lose the sale. Not, if they already have a copy of your sales letter with your contact information on it.

A few years ago most browsers did not print web pages well at all. But newer browsers are capable of printing really well. The problem is you have the web sales copy buried in the design of your site. It is surrounded by flashing animated images, banners, buttons, colors and all manners of web page stuff that is not going to print well at all.

So this is what we need to accomplish:

 We need to separate the sales copy from the web display properties and page, to present something to the prospect that would print well.

 We need to include a small javascript that will be a link they can click on to print this page.

 We need to include with the sales copy that gets printed off, our contact information so they can call or fax, and a order form suitable for mailing or faxing.

 We also want to keep the expense of this project down because we don't want to be writing the same copy twice - once to fit in with the theme of the site, and once on plain white background with black text for printing.

For those of you with professional hosting on either *nix flavoured servers or NT servers, you are more then likely able to use a simple language called XSSI. This means Extended Server Side Includes and is developed from SSI but now allows the use of conditional statements such as "if", "elif," else, etc.

So if the main article on your page has been added to the template as an included file, you can easily separate it from the rest of the template. Suppose the file name of the article you are looking at is called "smallbiz.shtml"

Most servers parse files with the "*.shtml" extension for SSI commands. This means that the commands are carried out before the content is sent to the users browser. This is why you won't see the coding if you use your browser's "view source."

At the very bottom of the document you see a little icon for a printer and a link that invites you to click for a printer friendly copy. In this example, the included file in "smallbiz.shtml" is called "smallbiz_bodycopy.shtml" so that when we click that link it can either open in a javascript window, or you can use the link attribute TARGET="_blank" top open a new copy of the browser with the printer friendly document loaded into it. This will exclude all the extraneous web page stuff you don't want printed

By using a little pre-planning we have buried some XSSI commands in this document that could not be executed when the file opened in "smallbiz.shtml". We execute these commands by having the document recognize a server variable such as the name of the document itself. Using a little code like this:

<!--#if expr="($DOCUMENT_NAME=/smallbiz_bodycopy.shtml/)" -->
           <!--#include FILE="js.js" -->
                   <!--#endif -->

What this is doing is including a little javascript that will be placed at the top of the window that will be a javascript link to print the page. All we are including with this file is:

<p ALIGN="center"><a href='javascript:;' onClick='window.print();return false'>Click Here to Print this page.</a>
You don't see this when the content was included in the template because the NAME of the document at that time was NOT "smallbiz_bodycopy.shtml" but was instead part of "smallbiz.shtml" so this Javascript link does not appear when the content is embedded with the regular document.

See? So it is possible to have any amount of content buried within the printer friendly version of the web page but not have it visible until they click the link which launches the main document into it's own window for printing.

As well, at the bottom of the document you could include a generic order form. That would appear in the page that gets printed off.

<!--#if expr="($DOCUMENT_NAME=/smallbiz_bodycopy.shtml/)" -->
<!--#include FILE="generic_order.html" -->
<!--#endif -->

I say "generic" when in fact you could include a custom order for each page, but then this creates more coding for yourself. A generic order form can be called in using a template file that is used for several web pages.

I know some of you might think that a generic form might not work for all products and this may be true. Then, Eaton's seemed to be able to do it for the thousands of items in their catalogue.

You could even swap online ordering info with off-line ordering info depending on how they view the document. You could also include special formatting with CSS (Style sheets) and swap out the files.