Accessible Web Sites Make Marketing Sense

Your web site accessibility is important to your marketing strategy. You want to make sure that your site is easy to access, navigate, and read. That includes every page, advertisement, and article that you have on your site. Consumers should be able to read your site even if they don’t have the newest, greatest, fastest computer. Your site should load quickly and not be too graphics intensive.

While PDFs are easy to create with the right software, they aren’t generally considered easily accessible, due to the requirements to open them. For a form that needs to be filled out, they’re fine. For e-books they are okay. But when you’re just trying to convey simple information that can easily be housed on a web page, why in the world would you choose a PDF?

Here’s an example: I received a marketing email from Kmart, noting an upcoming sale. It had the standard coupons and sales information. It had a call to action. It was fine. But it had what looked like a coupon noting that you could get $5 when you spend $25 in the store. Then there was a button for more details. I thought maybe it would send me to a printable coupon that had more details about the promotion.

Instead — you guessed it — the link opened a PDF. To tell me the restrictions of the promotion:

Get a coupon for $5 off health, beauty, food & consumables, book or magazine purchase

when you spend $25 in health or beauty departments.

Good towards your next purchase. Coupon prints at checkout. Limit (1) coupon per

transaction. See store for further details. Excludes pharmacy purchases.

Offer good in-store only. Valid through 9/5/09.

This could have easily been conveyed in a small pop-up window. Another page. Anything but a PDF.

Please don’t make your customers download a PDF for something like this. It’s lazy. It’s silly. And it’s not good for your marketing. It annoys customers. If they don’t have a PDF reader, sure, they can download it for free. But a short message like this is not worth it.

Find another way to convey your restrictions. Make it easy on your customer. Brush up on accessibility and best practices for web sites, or hire someone who knows them.