Every Advent, someone in your church clicks Print on the daily reading plan. What comes out of the printer is the navigation menu, a hero image, the reading itself squeezed into one narrow column, then the footer, the giving button, and a cookie banner across page three.
They wanted one clean page to keep by the coffee pot. They got six pages and a toner bill.
Who Still Prints
More people than we tend to assume. Older members who would rather read on paper. Families who tape the week's readings to the fridge. Small group leaders who mark up sermon notes. Volunteers printing a schedule for the welcome desk.
None of them will email to complain. They just quietly decide the website isn't for them.
The Fix Is a Few Lines of CSS
A print stylesheet tells the browser what to keep and what to drop when a page goes to paper. On most church sites, a small block like this does most of the work:
@media print {
header, nav, footer, .site-banner, .cookie-notice, .give-button {
display: none;
}
body {
font-size: 12pt;
color: #000;
background: #fff;
}
main {
width: 100%;
}
h2, h3 {
break-after: avoid;
}
img {
max-width: 100%;
break-inside: avoid;
}
}
Hide the chrome. Let the content use the full width. Use black text on white so it is legible on a cheap printer. Keep headings from stranding at the bottom of a page, away from the text they introduce.
One more touch helps a lot. Printed links lose their meaning, so it is worth showing where they point:
@media print {
main a[href^="http"]::after {
content: " (" attr(href) ")";
font-size: 10pt;
}
}
Now "Read the full passage" on paper still tells someone where to find it.
Test It Before December
Open your Advent page, your sermon notes, and your Christmas service times. Press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P) and look at the preview. If it runs past one or two pages, or the reading is buried under navigation, you have found the problem while there is still time to fix it.
We think of this as quiet hospitality. Nobody will compliment your print stylesheet. But the grandmother who prints the readings every morning will notice that the church thought about her too.
If you would like help getting your seasonal pages ready for screens and paper alike, we would be glad to talk.