[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 40 min. Donna Spencer is the author of A Practical Guide to Information Architecture as well as two other books (on card sorting and writing for the web). She’s an experienced information architect, based in Australia, who gives regular workshops on information architecture at conferences such as the IA Summit and also runs the UX … more »

If you know me, you know that I love WordPress. Which is why this post may seem a bit odd to you. Lately I have been exploring BlogEngine as a possible web platform for help. BlogEngine? That little startup blog platform that runs on .NET and Windows? Yes, I will explain in a moment. But first a quick recap on where we are in the … more »

Yes, I am continuing this series on Organizing Content, so if you are tired of it, check back in a while. My goal is to reach 100 posts on the topic. An Electricity Fast First, a brief bit of news. All the lights in my house are off because Jane wants to do an electricity fast. It’s a Thoreauvian experiment to see what you gain when you … more »

In my last post, I presented faceted classification and faceted search as an alternative method of organization for help content. While faceted navigation systems are common on the web, implementing a faceted navigation system to describe help content using one of the common help authoring tools, such as Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help,  is more challenging.

In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover other topics through browsing, and to provide one perspective on the organization of the material, but topic-based navigation shouldn’t be the only means of navigating the content. Another way to allow users to find your … more »

I mentioned in a previous post that I think traditional help authoring tools are becoming less and less viable for robust software projects in which multiple subject matter experts in distributed locations need to collaborate, and when these same subject matter experts need to own the documentation after release. This wasn’t just a fleeting thought. I spent the last couple of days last week getting … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 25 min. The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves. I’ve written … more »

Assigning unique styles to each category level in WordPress requires you to insert the following classes in your stylesheet: Top level: .cat-item a { } Second level: .cat-item ul li a { } Third level: .cat-item ul ul li a { } I created a five-minute video showing how the addition of these category classes to your WordPress stylesheet will change the style of each … more »

Top 10 List of People to Unfollow on Twitter | Shannon Whitley. (Thanks to Ellis Pratt for the link.)

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is Beth Long’s Spork in the Road. Beth, who I knew from the Suncoast chapter, is interested in the intersection of the creative and the technical. As I remember, she was writing a novel when I left, and was very focused on it. She also had a very enviable job creating fictional text for an online game. Here’s … more »