August 2008
Does your website do PDF?
Posted by: Mark on 14 Aug 2008 @ 2:44 pm Category: Programming and Coding for the Web
A lot of website owners can answer "Yes" to this question. But how far does their PDF integration go? Do they only have downloadable but static PDF documents or does their website generate PDF files on the fly with dynamic data in it?
Where branding becomes more and more important each day, people still get ugly looking plain text e-mails containing their confirmation order or invoice from an online shop. Almost impossible to find what you actually ordered. And if you need to print it for your own archive you would have loved to have the invoice as a PDF document. Although receiving an e-mail in HTML is an option as well, some markup issues still exist between multiple e-mail clients. What looks good in one e-mail client just doesn't work in the other. And some e-mail clients don't accept HTML e-mail at all. So, to provide a consistent look all the time for your invoice, let your website create the invoice in PDF and send it to your customer.
Around two years ago I had a situation where I would have loved to have received the confirmation of my order in a PDF file.
My girlfriend and I decided to invite my parents on a holiday to the United Kingdom. With the possibilities of the internet I went to the website of a huge car rental agency. I chose a car in the right category and paid by credit card.
A couple of minutes later I received an automated but unreadable e-mail from their website. In general you wouldn't start reading the mumble jumble, but since the e-mail was sitting in the preview pane in my e-mail client for a while I suddenly spotted a serious error. The car in the category I had hired was different than the car written in the e-mail. The car mentioned was in a cheaper category than I ordered. And since this car was destined to become our travel companion for a two weeks holiday with four people, I doubted if this car would be big enough for the four of us and our baggage. So I decided to give the car rental agency a call and tried to explain what had happened. In the end we had a great holiday with a great car, but it would have been so much easier and more comfortable from the customer's perspective, if we just received a dynamically generated PDF with all the rental details in it.
Many opportunities arise, both for you the business, as well as the customer, when integrating PDF files in your website:
- Let people upload photos and add the birthdays of their family/friends/colleagues to create a wonderful birthday calendar. Show them a preview in PDF and let them order the high resolution calendar.
- Neat and well designed invoicing for online shops.
- Create your own christmas cards with your own photos and add a personal note.
- Create tickets for big events and add a unique barcode to it. It saves you a lot of time waiting in the queue to buy a ticket.
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