How To Embed A Document On Your Website
Have you ever wished you were able to publish a copy of your printed brochure or menu on your website so customers could read it or download it online? Embedding a document on your website is actually very easy to do and I'm going to show you two ways to do it right now!
As a business owner, there are many useful reasons for embedding a document on your website:
- The current schedule of programs or classes for your business
- A signup form that needs to be printed and filled out by customers
- A guide or instructions for using your product or service that people can read online or download
You can embed all sorts of different files such as:
- PDF and Word documents
- Spreadsheets
- Power Point presentations
- Audio files such as MP3's
There are two ways to host a document on your website, linking to the document itself or embedding the document directly onto your website so people can see the document online. The benefits of embedding the document over just linking to the files are:
- Customers can read the document online instead of having to download it first in order to read it
- Customers can see what they are downloading
- Customers may not want to download it, they may just want to read it online
In order to embed a document on your website, the first thing we'll need to do is upload the document to an online storage document service. I've written about several cloud storage services in the past, but for today, I'm going to discuss how to embed a document using Google Docs (now called Google Drive). If you don't have a Google or Google Apps account or would just rather use another service, I would recommend Box.com, they have a free plan and it's really easy to grab the embed code from a document after it's been uploaded. Once you have the embed code, you'll follow the same steps below for placing the code onto your website.
Login to your Gmail account and click on “Documents”
This will open up your Google Docs page
Once on the Docs page, upload the document you want to embed
Once the file is uploaded, click on the file you want to embed. This will open up the document in the Google Docs online viewer
Click on “File” and select “Publish to the Web” on the drop down menu
Once you make this selection, the linking and embed options will appear
Select you linking option
#1 Be sure to leave the option to require viewers to login to their Google accounts UNCHECKED
#2 Select the “Web Page” tab and select the “HTML to embed in a page” option.
Copy the HTML code
Copy the HTML code so we can paste the code on our website.
Paste the HTML code into your website
I use WordPress to power my website, here you will simply paste the code in the page where you want to embed the document. Make sure you're using the HTML page editor to paste the code and not the visual editor.
Here's the finished embed
The size of the spreadsheet I embedded is a bit too large for my blog page. You can adjust the size of the embed window by increasing/decreasing the Height and Width inside the embed code, it's simply a matter of changing the sizing numbers around to see what size works best for your document and website.
Embedding documents on your website isn't very difficult after you've done it once or twice and it makes life simpler for your customers when they can view your menu or brochure online. If you run into any difficulty with these steps or have any questions about it, you can always send me a message.
Gary
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