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Create HTML Data-sheets for on-line use, quickly and easily using off-line databases.

Many sites end up using acrobat pdf pages for their on-line datasheets.

I am not sure why this is but there must be some convenience factor for the information producers.

The client can probably get their datasheets produced in pdf format by the graphics people who created their catalogue.

Many programs offer the save as pdf format now.

The resulting pages are great for printing (usually) and passing to others in a fixed format. But pdf pages are terrible for the web for the following reasons.

1. Adobe pdf (portable document format) pages are usually larger in file size than a similar HTML page would be, thus they take longer to load slowing the response of your website to its visitors wishes. Sometimes the pdf version can be 100k plus and while the HTML version might add up to 35k - 50k with images included, something (text for example) can be made to appear in a couple of seconds to the viewer making the page appear to load much more than a little faster.

2. pdf pages are not the base Internet standard. This is HTML. The most key disadvantage here is that you cannot have live hyperlinks within pdf documents.

3. Not search engine friendly. There is to my knowledge only one search engine currently making any effort to index pdf files .

4. Not everyone has the reader, and why should they, do you ask people to wear special glasses to look at your product brochure, why ask them to download (or wait while it opens, if they already have it) a special program to look at your datasheets.

Plain jane HTML pages optimised for screen and printout simply are best?

But I have hundreds of products surely this will take months?

Not exactly,

Here is one way to take the stress out of it.

Separate the contents of the HTML datasheet you want to create, the images, the performance measures, the diagrams etc from the HTML and create a one off HTML template in an off-line database.

Note: if your products fall into families, with different datasheet requirements, you may need one template for each family.

Now create all the graphic contents and save them to a folder ("images" perhaps.)

Add the textual contents of all the product datasheets to a new database, (or table within the database) one record for each datasheet.

Now comes the fun bit, merge them all together and you have all your HTML datasheet pages ready to upload to your website.

If you have your product performance data already in a database or spreadsheet, all the easier, all that is required is the HTML template and the report or query to merge the two together and create the HTML files.

Now you have all your product datasheets as fast loading HTML files which can be indexed by all the search engines. If you decide to change your datasheet format or your website image, you now have only to change the one template and output your files again in the new format.

Most significantly:

It is now more likely that if someone enters one of your part numbers or product descriptions into Yahoo, Google, Alta-vista etc they will be directed straight to your website where they should be.

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 28 June 2001

If you have a product catalogue you would like created in HTML web compatible pages contact me at the email address above for a quote.