How To Create a Usable Index — Interview with John McGhie
October 20th, 2006 | Posted in Podcasts 9 Comments »
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Duration: 36 min.
John McGhie, technical writer and Microsoft MVP from Sydney, Australia, explains how to create a usable index for your help material.
In this interview, John covers the following topics:
- Deciding whether to create an index
- Skills required to create an index
- Steps in creating an index
- Audience considerations in creating an index
- Time required for creating an index
- Pitfalls writers face when creating an index
- Myths of the concordance file method for creating indexes
- Strategies for entries and subentries
- Methods for updating an index
- Determining whether your index is usable
For additional information, see the following:
- John McGhie’s bio
- John’s helpful article on indexing that I mention in the podcast
- The Word MVP home page
** To contact John, you can e-mail him at john@mcghie.name.
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If you are interested in creating indexes, this is an podcast. The few times I tried to create an index have proven how hard creating a good index is. John McGhie has provided many helpful tips about indexing and he really seems to be an expert.
I meant to say that this is an EXCELLENT podcast in my previous comments.
[...] How To Create a Usable Index — Interview with John McGhie [...]
I just listened to the interview about how to create an index and feel better equipped to create one for a little cookbook I have just finished writing.
It was my first podcast and I was delighted with the tone and attitude of both speakers. You are good teachers, very clear and down to earth. I took notes which I will carefully file when I’m done.
Thank you, thank you both for being there when needed. Betsy
It’s amazing for me to know that podcasts recorded years ago still provide valuable information. This one was densely packed with excellent information on indexing. I’m glad you found it useful. Thanks for leaving a comment.
[...] to instructions on how to create an index. i found a particularly good one by a technical writer at how to create a usable index [...]
Hi,
I just wanted to convey that this podcast was truly helpful, very informative and overall – worth my time to hear. I appreciated the non-music background, I love how the topics were directly answered and formalities with small talk weren’t included.
This audio podcast was brief and concise information that I needed to hear – and I would have paid money to hear this interview as well – it’s that valuable!
I’m not a technical writer but a web architect who is trying to illustrate how difficult an index is to construct for websites – since a website is a moving/changing/instable content provider – it’s hard to create an auto-index of subjects that readers would want to lookup.
I think this audio presentation represents my view more constructively and can voice my opinion in a logical manner – far better than my own words – since the topics covered are from the tech writer expert of Microsoft – hence more weight in the argument.
Again – I can’t thank you enough for sharing this and I will have to keep this in my favorites for all time – I look forward in hearing more topics from “Tech Writers” – since I also face challenges in writing documentation for CMS applications to users who have difficulty in using the “internet” period….patience has been my greatest skillset.
Jean, thanks for taking the time to comment. This podcast with McGhie is full of useful information about indexing. As far as creating a site index, why not use a system of categories and tags like on The Blog Herald? If I remember correctly, John McGhie is mostly talking about indexes for documents. With documents, a lot of people just search for keywords rather than turning to an index. I can imagine the same would be true for a website, right? If you can implemented faceted browsing on the search, I think that’s also cool.
Thanks for the entry on disaster preparedness. I will have to put this into effect. Thank you!