It seems that more and more people are printing web pages and saving them for later than they are reading everything on screen. I personally have too many websites, blogs, podcasts and news pages than I could possibly get to in one day.
When we started planning out the redesign of our site, one of the things we set our sights on was accessibility. Not only making our site accessible to the impaired, but to anyone in any medium. Screen, print, mobile. We wanted you to be able to get to the content that was relevant to you as quickly and easily as possible.
Go ahead. Try printing this page. You'll notice that what you get on paper is a bit different than what you get on screen. What we've done is added a print stylesheet that overwrites a lot of the styles defined in our global stylesheet. The Navigation and Header are stripped out. The left (sub) navigation is stripped out. The fonts are changed to a friendlier serif font, and the page width is set to 100%, giving you a better fit on paper.
All in all, it looks, and acts, completely different. It's just one of the things we did to make our site more accessible, more usable, and hopefully, more effective.
Stay tuned. I will be writing a second part to this article on the technical aspects of defining multiple Cascading Style Sheets for different mediums.
