Creating franchise operations manuals that are customisable and controlled

Creating an operations manual is a key part of franchising any business, as it helps ensure each franchisee is operating in the way that made the original, franchised, business successful in the first place. You want reliable, repeatable, consistent performance from every franchised location. However, it’s often the case that there needs to be slight… Read more »

The SEO benefits of Web-based Help – case studies

Web-based product documentation is often the quickest way to learn how to resolve an issue, and we can see this from statistics provided recently by both Mindtouch and Atlassian. Mindtouch is reporting organic searches account for almost 60% of referrals to its client Autodesk’s WikiHelp product documentation community. Online Help is also the number one… Read more »

Review of “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”

XML Press kindly sent me a reviewer’s copy of Alan J. Porter’s book “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”. I interviewed Alan earlier in the year (which you can see on the Cherryleaf YouTube Channel), so it was good to see the book that he was mentioning in the interview. It’s important not… Read more »

The wonderful, horrible life of User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC), that is user documentation written by users, is growing trend in the world of technical communication. However, although there are enormous benefits from UGC, we’ve found it can lead users to miss professionally written user documentation. The consequence of this can be that users search and navigate down blind allies in a… Read more »

How many cuddles are you putting into your user guides?

From Fast Company: “Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. The essence of affection. The cuddle chemical. In other words, oxytocin. If these changes apply in the world of social media, the implications for business — for every brand, company, and marketer… Read more »