Gerry McGovern explains that constantly adding tiny tasks to a home page can bury your main message. Each bit of content you add dilutes the importance of the other content. I would add that the same principle applies to writing. Each word you add to a sentence removes some of the focus from the other words. Sometimes the best way to increase a sentence's emphasis is by simplifying the sentence and removing content around it. To read Gerr...
A PhD student studying blog usability, Kathy Cook, published some worthwhile research about blog usability. Cook recommends bloggers keep the following in mind: 1. Subscribing makes users think too hard. 2. Mystery puzzles make users think too hard. 3. Long pages make users work too hard. 4. Users can't find information, can't search. 5. Get organised down there! 6. No navigation, no way home. 7. Users can't share the love. She also rates...
Our Intermountain STC chapter recently did something different for our meetings. Instead of the monthly meeting that takes place at an always-distant location in the evening, we held a half-day event on a Friday afternoon with three presentations in a row focused on a theme. Surprisingly, it worked quite well. We had probably double the number of people who normally attend our evening meetings. Lots of people showed up for our half-day e-...
My wife Jane attended a Segullah writer's retreat conference this weekend. During the conference, one of the presenters explained a common mistake many novice writers make: they look for stories to fit a pre-selected theme. You hear the result of this strategy most commonly in church talks. Someone is assigned a topic, or has a topic he or she wants to explore. To make the talk/presentation/essay appealing, he or she looks for stories to ...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
The following is a sponsored message from David Ferriot of Madcap Software. MadCap Software has launched a new community-written newsletter, MadNewz, aimed to give users another channel to share ideas and information with their peers. The first MadNewz post, written by Chris Sullivan, Director of Technical Communication and Social Media at AVST, covers best practices for Flare single-sourcing and includes a cost-calculator sheet availa...
In the unfolding saga of inline links within posts and the decline in readability that these links bring about, Adriel Hampton's post helped me persuade me more to this idea. Hamptom quotes from Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr writes, (In a 2001 study) one group read (a short story) in a traditional linear-text format; they'd read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second ...
Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year's conference focuses on social media. You can't run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience. Lavacon's conference website incorporates a number ...
The following is a sponsored message from Dennis Crane of Indigo Byte Systems. Indigo Byte Systems, the producer of Dr.Explain help authoring tool (http://www.drexplain.com) is proud to become a Gold Sponsor of 2010 UA Europe Conference that will take place on 16th - 17th September 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden. UA Europe Conference is an annual even focused specifically on software user assistance and on-line help systems. It provides a ...
If you're in Utah and interested in e-learning, come to the June e-Learning event held by the Intermountain-stc chapter. I'll be giving a presentation on developing a personal voice in audio. It's the same presentation I gave at the Summit in Dallas: Chapter member Tom Johnson will present on how to develop a personal voice in audio. You'll learn how to create video tutorials with a friendly, personable voice by implementing several aud...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
This comprehensive post by Justin Tadlock, Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus!, covers the new menu system in WordPress 3.0 in depth. I've been using the new menu system on some WordPress 3.0 sites, and I have to say it looks like one of the best new features in 3.0. You can drag and drop categories, pages, and external URLs directly onto a navigation bar. As an example, I upgraded the navigation on intermountain-stc.org to 3.0. It combin...
Even though I dismissed the relevance of help authoring tools in my last post, I thought this writeup by Sarah Maddox on help authoring tools from a presentation by Matthew Ellison at a tech comm conference in Australia was worthwhile and helpful. Sarah paraphrases Matthew: HATs hide the complexity and allow you to concentrate on the content. You don't need to worry about coding and scripting, conditional tags and other mechanics under ...
