3 ways your fabulous content ticks me off

Spidey and I have frequent discussions about user expectations, and while I'm sure mine are different than the layman's because I work in web, I think they're still relevant.

In any given day, I read a lot of content. Some relates to my job and some doesn't, but I've become a fairly intrepid skimmer. Today I found an article that was relevant to me, interesting, well-written, and a complete pain in my bum. Why? Because there was no "print this article" option. Here's why that's an issue:

1. People still print. Yes, I have tons of bookmarks, an overwhelmed del.icio.us account and a truckload of starred RSS items, but I still share and save about 5% of my content by printing it out, especially at work. I can write on a printed doc and hand it to Jeff to read on the plane (for that no-devices phase that drives him nuts).

2. Distortion. Are you aware that when I print your page from my browser (as opposed to the "print this document" option) that your article suddenly looks like crap? There are header links pushing the content down to the middle of the page, and your ads, links, blogrolls, archives, etc are causing the content to shrink and break awkwardly. I have to actually sort through this muck to get to the one-page article that you spent a lot of time working on.

3. Comments, forms, trackbacks. I printed a one-page article that spewed out six additional pages of inane comments, forms to leave inane comments, and a stream of trackbacks (which are unusable to me when I'm printing anyway). I just single-handedly destroyed the Earth.

It disheartens me to see this on sites that work so hard to routinely develop meaningful content, including tons of ways to sort and distribute their stuff digitally, and then miss this step, perhaps thinking that the printed word is incongruous with 2.0. I assure you that isn't (entirely) the case, in the same way that the Kindle, popular as it may be, won't replace physical books any time soon.