David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »
Tag: strategy
What does Stack Overflow’s success mean for traditional User Assistance?
Last night, I saw Joel Spolsky speak at a London Enterprise Technology Meetup, held at the London School of Economics. Joel is one of the founders of Stack Overflow, a hugely popular question-and-answer website on the topic of computer programming. He also claimed in a blog post back in April 2000, no-one reads manuals (see our… Read more »
Proving your technical content is the most important content on your website
In yesterday’s post, How technical content on the Web is turning traditional marketing strategy on its head, we discussed the importance of technical content to today’s marketing funnel. You might be thinking, show me more evidence.
How technical content on the Web is turning traditional marketing strategy on its head
Kathy Sierra famously summed up most marketing departments’ approach to content in this slide: To paraphrase her, the website and brochure are a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. Today, the way people use the Internet means this approach to marketing needs to change
Webinar: Towards an Agile authoring methodology – learning from Lean
Agile programming has grown in popularity and it has led to new challenges for those involved in providing user assistance for those applications. So is it time for technical authors to develop an equivalent method for developing content for these projects? Is it time to develop an “Agile authoring” methodology? Also, if we want to… Read more »