I'll Say She Is!
Wednesday, 26 March 2003
Mr. B

I made my famous steak sandwiches for dinner last night, to celebrate surviving my first web site-related encounter with Mr. B.

Mr. B is the octogenarian who owns the company I work for. Like many smaller companies, there is someone (or several someones) on hand to run the company. However, there are some projects Mr. B takes an interest in, sections of the web site being one of them. He brought me into his office, which is furnished with some 'interesting' art, the most notable being a painting of an old cowboy smoking doobage. (Oh yeah, and an autographed photo of Bill Clinton, thanking Mr. B for his support during Willy's first term of office.) He and I sat on the same side of the desk while he wrote out and explained what he wanted. Manageable stuff, except he is very hung up on the 'print screen' key working, which, as you probably know, has been somewhat of a misnomer with the advent of Windows. The modus operandi of the current Web Chyck is to ensure that the pages Mr. B is most likely to print fit on a page, even if it means removing standard sidebar-type menus and such. Hey, it's his company.

By the way, I have learned that I am not the "Webmaster" at the office, but I am "in charge of maintaining the web site". Which, as long as I'm a neophyte web designer, is fine by me.

Posted by ginevra (link)
Comments
Neat trick: if he's using Internet Explorer, you can create a special version of the page, and refer to it in the real page's <head> section like so:

<link rel="alternate" media="print" href="special-version-name.html">


That way, you can have the Web page look consistent with all of your site's other pages, but when he hits the print button, it'll fetch the special page, which you can design to look the way he likes his printed pages to look.