Anyone who has ever attempted to use photoshop to save a document as a pdf has encountered the dreaded conversion limitations of photoshop when it comes to saving a file as a pdf.

Long story short, documents with even the smallest images in photoshop result in tremendously large file sizes in the finished pdf document.   Working your way through the compression options and format selections, you will eventually run into the fact that you can either have a good looking document or a small document… not both.  This article shows you a quick and dirty method for generating a very small sized pdf for your site.

If you search online (even at the adobe website) for techniques to reduce the file size you will see many suggestions to use the ‘reduce file size’ option in acrobat.   Yet starting with a 5mb photoshop file you will be lucky to end up below 3mb after using their suggested technique.   A quick, dirty and efficient alternative is described below.   To use this method, you must have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer.

1. Open your psd document (in my case I am using a document 6mb  (8.5 x 11 Canvas Size at a resoultion of 300dpi).
2. Reduce your resultion to 150dpi (this is for moderate image useage… if you have large, important images you may want to keep it at 300dpi).   This is done via the Alt + CTRL +I command or Image – Image Size menu option.
3. 
4. Next, select File – Save For Web and Devices from the menu options.
5. We will save this file as a gif using high quality options (and preserving transparancy if it exists)
6. 
7. Find this .gif file and right-click.  Select the ‘Convert to Adobe PDF” command.   *Note: this assumes you have adobe acrobat installed on your system.  If you don’t… well then you’re in some trouble…

Using my example, I now have a pdf 142kb in size.   This is a massive size savings and allows me to have a pdf that web surfers can download and print.

There are some downsides to this technique.   First, you cannot preserve text as text for use in acrobat… so you cannot allow electronic editing and the pdf itself is not editable.  To make changes you need to go back to your original psd file to do so and then repeat this technique.

So as long as you do not need the pdf to be electronically edited and submitted and merely need a small, downloadable and printable document for your website you are good to go.

Blame Google.

Flash sites are some of the most elegant and enjoyable web sites on the web.  Their fatal flaw is that search engines like Google are unable to index the content held within a flash file.  If the search engines can’t index your content, it may as well not exist as far as the average web user is concerned.

This may not be a problem for organizations with mature, vibrant brands.  Take Coca Cola for example.  Coke is a company with a strong, recognizable brand.  Their web visitors know how to get there, they are not stumbling on the coke website from a Google Search (unless they are googling ‘coke’).  Thus, Coke does not need to worry about search engines indexing all their content. They can use their web site as an extension of existing marketing efforts.  Traditional marketing (tv, print, etc) drives visitors to www.icoke.ca

If you visited that link you might notice that the entire site is developed in flash.  It makes for a nice web visit.

Now imagine that you are Martha’s Homemade Jewelry  Inc.  a small company making custom-designed jewelry.  You lack the billions of dollars spent on marketing that Coke can manage, you need your website to create traffic and interest in your product that you can’t generate through traditional marketing means.  A flash web site is not for you.

You need your website to be full of content that the search engines can index and categorize as being relevant to web searchers looking for jewelry online.  This means standard text available in your source code.

This does not mean that no flash content should be included on your site.  In fact, a flash header providing rotating images, slogan, factoids etc can be an excellent visual complement to solid text content on the same page.  Just use them sparingly for non-critical content.  And definitely, definitely stay away from 100% flash landing pages.  It is a waste of a page if the search engines can’t read it.

The most beautiful, cutting edge design is useless if nobody will ever find it.  Until Google finalizes a search engine that can read flash (and they are working on it) avoid it for all but the most supplementary purposes.