You probably have a website and when you need new pages created, you send copy to your designers... and magically, a new or updated page is born! But what is the preferred format for your designers receiving these changes? Coordinating efforts with your designer means your pages are created/updated faster for your audience, there's less chance of errors, and the time saved can be put towards upgrades, improvements, and new content. Is a pdf easier to make into a webpage than a word document? Am I helping if I take my word document and save as a webpage?

There are endless ways to send information to others on the Internet these days. Many are fairly universal in the business world, such as pdfs, email, PowerPoint Presentations, HTML, and Word. All of these can be used to communicate the content you'd like to use on your website, but some are easier (and less time-consuming) than others.

In general, all formatting including bulleted and numbered lists, em-dashes and other font characters, alignment other than default/left-align, and various font sizes and font colors will have be coded by hand once the copy has been imported into the web page. The exception (for most formatting issues) is Quark documents, but Quark is rarely used for simple text-only documents.

PDFs

Acrobat PDFs are great for creating documents that are going to printed, and for creating a page that cannot be altered. Sending a PDF to a web designer is great if all you want is a link to that PDF. But, using the text from a pdf can be time-consuming. Copying text from a PDF requires either copying and pasting line by line, or selecting an entire column of text and having to format out all the line breaks. If there's no other way, or it's a small amount of text, a pdf is do-able, but if you have access to it, it's much faster to send it in the Word document or other text editor that was originally used to create the PDF document's copy.

PDFs are good for stand-alone pages that are linked to from within your website. To recreate pages based on the content of a PDF, it's best to use the text from the PDF's original format (Word, etc.)

Scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the most efficient): 3

Email

Email is much like Word docs when sending text for a web page, except that sometimes it translates the line breaks into hard returns on the web page and these will all need to be removed. Also, sending email text with any formatting (italics, bold, etc.) can get lost in the translation and the designer will not know what you want the final product to look like. Email is do-able, but is best for smaller amounts of text.

Email works great unless it includes formatting such as italics, bold, etc. which can be lost in the transmittal.

Scale from 1 to 10: 8

PPTs

PowerPoint Presentations — if you've used PowerPoint you'll know — are comprised of several text and image boxes. It's not as easy as Select-All, copy, and paste into the contents, it's more like Select-All, copy, paste; Select-All, copy, paste; Select-All, copy, paste; Select-All, copy, paste; Select-All, copy, paste; etc.

Scale from 1 to 10: 2

HTML

Yes, you can take a word document and save it as HTML. But, the designer will have to clean up the odd code (or live with the results). Microsoft adds all kinds of strange code to it's page when you turn a word doc into an HTML page. This is the code for one line of text, a heading, after Saving As a webpage in Microsoft Word:

These Word to HTML pages contain a ton of code, often slowing the page loading time. A text-only page should open quick as a jack rabbit. Also, your font and font sizes will be transferred to the web page and these may or may not be the website's standard font/size as indicated by the style sheet. Removing the formatting takes much longer than applying it to unformatted text.

Scale from 1 to 10: 6

Word Docs

Word documents are fairly straight forward and the best bet when sending copy to your designer. It's basically a matter of Select-All, copy, and paste. As with all methods, attention needs to be paid to the page after pasting—the designer goes through and makes sure that all the paragraphs are separated correctly, creates italic and bold text where needed, and fixes all font characters such as em-dashes throughout. But, using the Word doc as the guide, the designer can quickly and easily recreate your work from your Word document, to your web page.

Scale from 1 to 10: 10