Should All White Papers Have a Front Cover?
Call me weird, but I hate it when a white paper doesn’t have a front cover. It doesn’t have to be a fancy colorful illustration. Even a front cover with large, bold text fits the bill.
When a white paper is missing a front cover, it reminds me of my days in grade school, when you took out a well-worn book from the library that had been chewed on by some other student’s pet rottweiller.
A good example is this very worthwhile white paper by blogsecurity.net, entitled “How to Secure a WordPress Install”. The white paper provides solutions that address a growing problem for many bloggers where spam get posted as blog comments. I can relate to this problem because it seems that removing spam from my blog is a task that is reminiscent of swashing cockroaches.
When you open the white paper, you’re immediately presented with the table of contents, which seems weird and almost as if something got left out when the document was converted to a PDF file. I other examples that I’ve seen, the first page is the Introduction or Executive Summary.
From my opinion, this practice is wrong. Not a cardinal sin worthy of a good flogging, but something that seems like a sin of unprofessionalism than anything else. It also makes the sponsor of the white paper seem like they don’t know what they are doing.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to add a cover to your white paper. After all if someone you just met didn’t shake your hand, wouldn’t it get the rest of the visit off to a bad start? Don’t do the same with your reader.
What’s your first impression when you see a white paper without a front cover?
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