How to build a multi-million dollar business by putting manuals on the Web

One of the issues we’ve been promoting for many years is the importance for Technical Authors to publish their user guides and online Help on the Web. A surprisingly large amount of companies still don’t offer Web versions, for reasons that include: It’s too difficult Our competitors might read it and reverse-engineer our product Support/Training/Marketing… Read more »

Our 2nd ‘Trends in Technical Documentation’ Talk – 9th May 2012

Cherryleaf is curating and hosting a programme of talks on trends in technical documentation. At these sessions, there’ll be presentations from respected members of the Technical Communication profession, plus the opportunity to network with your peers. The next talk is: User Assistance in a Social World We’ll be looking questions, such as: Where does technical documentation… Read more »

Technical writing in the Cloud

One of the most popular developments in computing in recent years has been the emergence of cloud-based computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). Examples of cloud-based computing include Google’s GMail: Instead of an application being installed locally on a user’s computer, it runs on a remote server, accessed via the user’s Web browser. So is technical… 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 »

The User Manual 2.$

Here is an interesting interview between Robert Scoble and Aaron Fulkerson of Midtouch on how MindTouch’s technical communication software is changing how people work together at big companies. “We started seeing more and more of our customers—Intuit and Microsoft, Intel and Autodesk and Mozilla – launching these documentation communities where they have a body of… Read more »