Other uses for your content

I went to a company’s Web site today to get their address. I’ve got an appointment with the company next week and I wanted to put their address in my calendar. The company’s Web site uses white text on a dark background, so when I copied the address and pasted it into Outlook, I couldn’t see it. It pasted into Outlook as white text.

Now you could argue that this is an Outlook problem. And it is. Outlook should be smart enough to realize that pasting white text on a white background is silly and correct the color for you. But since Outlook and other applications have this problem, you need to take that into consideration when putting together your Web site.

When you put information on your Web site, you need to remember that the text you write might be used in ways that you didn’t think of. Potential clients, customers, and partners might copy and paste any text you have on the site into another document. You need to test your content in alternate environments.

Another common problem is companies that set their text as a graphic or in Flash. I’ve seen countless companies that place their phone number in a big graphic banner at the top of each page. That makes it impossible to copy and paste the phone number into a contact manager. It also introduces accessibility problems. Customers might be trying to look up your phone number from a text-only web browser on a mobile phone.

It’s impossible to account for all the ways that someone might try and access and use your information. You’ll never test for them all. The thing to remember is that every non-standard thing you do will increase the odds that someone’s going to have a problem.