This post has a dual purpose to share an updated post for you on paper and printing (which I trust has lots of useful content) and to share it in two more formats: an e-book and a PDF.

The reason I'm sharing these formats is that along with the reality that we live in a multi-channel world today where people take in information in a variety of ways, along with that some ways are easier for or preferred by certain people to access. Some like to read on-screen, some like print. Screen size can vary from quite small on our phones to various sizes of tablets and up to what many of us spend our day in front of--a computer screen.

Each of these has a format that is more readable or maybe more preferred than others. In addition, some are easier to share than others. This last point is important because a lot of the information on this site, I trust is useful to share with church communication volunteers or decision-making staff. Because of that I have experimented with various formats and here is what I have and some comments on each one. Below my comments are downloads of the e-book and the PDF:

Reading on-screen: this is quick and easy; probably most of you are initially reading this post this way. One thing I am very happy about and why I selected this website template when I redid the site is that this site reads extremely well on a mobile phone, which may be useful to pass on a link to a staff member who lives on their phone.

PDF print out: some people appreciate a printed page and I recently added the Print Post and Page Plugin to the site that adds a big PRINT button at the bottom of articles. If you hit that, it will create a PDF without all the extra junk on the page that would come up if you just used your printer button. There is a samples of this below. Hit the button and it immediately creates the PDF which can be great for printing off and sharing an article at, for example, a staff meeting.

E-book: sometimes you want to forward something to someone and you want it to look good and be very readable on-screen. This is where an e-book format is useful. I just started using a program that creates them (designrr.io), I'm not totally thrilled with it and have a lot of bugs to work out, but I do really like how easy to read the final product is. This would be a great format to forward to people. If attached to an email, it would download and open nicely for reading. This is also a way for me to aggregate content from related articles which I will be doing for ECC Members in the future.

Below are the samples, if you have time to comment on them, which you like or not or whatever, I'd appreciate your feedback. [Read more...]