Everyone knows that in order for information to be of any use to the general public, it must be capable of being rendered by any possible platform and operating system out there. As a consequence, universal formats such as HTML and PDF have become general household names in the world of data exchange whether it is on the World Wide Web or in the professional work environment.

No doubt, you've experienced the need to convert between the two formats in such cases where some users don't have a PDF reader or if you need to keep the integrity of the HTML web page for others to view. Notably, with the growing widespread use of the World Wide Web, website construction using HTML is booming into a growing industry. Everyone from the professional designer to the most amateur is creating HTML pages.

Web Designing, HTML and You

A good website is a good balance between textual and visual data. The first impression on the 3 second attention span of a Web surfer is important. Hence, most likely, you'll spend most of your time on the content of your site.

In order to achieve a visually appealing site you'll probably try to cram all kinds of professional graphics and images on your page, which translates into hours of fine-tuning with image file formats such as JPEGs, GIFs, and SWF (flash files). Too much time and too much work.

Also to remember is that the content of a website depends upon its purpose. Hence, the amount and nature of your data can vary. For some, using external links and supplementary formats is the most common way to populate a website. However, it means you'll also have to consider the amount of linkage and levels you want your site to contain--that means more planning and organizing.

Let's not forget, that web pages work with an underlying programming language, most commonly HTML. You'll need to use HTML for embedding the content onto your web page. That can take hours of tedious encoding and configuration. Does the amount of work ever cease?

HTML and the PDF

A simple way to be efficient? Incorporate content already converted directly into HTML. This is where one data exchange format can come in handy: the PDF.

Conversion using material from a PDF will allow for easier web content construction. In addition, PDFs retain the graphic integrity of the image, being capable of rendering vector and bitmap images. So you don't have to worry about losing image quality.

It may sound unorthodox, but if you have an information container that can contain and retain the integrity of both the textual and graphical information you need, why not use it for that purpose? Certain processes for constructing a website can't be totally done away with altogether, like the HTML coding aspect. It can only be facilitated.