Stop torturing your end users with cumbersome PDF documents that rely on completely insular in-document navigation. Instead, transform the information into something easily navigatable as well as simple to create and maintain by creating a website with WordPress, Drupal, SharePoint, or another content management system.

Why is web better?

You can easily search with one search bar and provide conditionals to return customized results instead of having to dive into individual PDFs’ search bars.

If you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or SharePoint Online, anyone can create, edit, and upload content to the website without knowing code. If you require any customizations, you can hire web developers, like myself, or try piecemealing third-party plugins that were built by unknown developers with untested quality.

As a web developer, I can customize views and create interfaces that are tailored to the end user, whether they are the website’s audience or admin users creating the content.

For example, at Healthfirst, instead of linking PDFs on a website as requested, I created a custom child-themed WordPress website that houses all of the quick reference guides (QRGs) as webpages. The titles of the QRGs get dynamically generated into an index whenever you publish one, which can be searched with one search bar and sorted by user role.

I modified the WordPress templates with PHP, jQuery, JavaScript, and CSS so that each QRG allows you the ability to print, email or save the webpage as a PDF. Additionally, the last updated date shows instead of the published date to indicate how old the set of instructions are.

I also wrote a custom script so that employees can click on a device to view only the instructions that pertain to their device. I accomplished this by creating special CSS classes that control which information gets shown, which can be added and edited by the WordPress built-in word editor.