Beneath the page: learning to see structure
We hear a lot about the learning curve for structured authoring, but what does that really mean?
Author: Sarah O'Keefe
Celebrating the good stuff (Blog Secret Santa)
Or: A stranger takes over the Scriptorium blog and gets all enthusiastic about tone of voice
Merry Christmas, Scriptorium readers. And, Sarah O’Keefe, an especially Merry Christmas to you. I’m your writer, Santa, and this is your Blog Secret Santa gift. (Everyone else: yep, hi. I’m a random stranger writing for Sarah’s blog. Because Christmas is fun.)
And here’s your present: Four websites that perform the rare magic trick of taking things that are normally really boring and making them entertaining.
Content strategy and relocation: the trauma is the same
We moved into a new office at the end of October. The new space is bigger and nicer than the old space, but nonetheless, the moving process was painful. As a child, I moved several times and changed schools every two or three years. I then landed in North Carolina for college and stayed put. It occurs to me that a new content strategy introduces much of the same pain as relocation.
Content strategy: first steps (premium)
Content: You’re doing it wrong. That’s easy for me to say—we rarely hear from people who are happy with their content. But are you ready for a major transformation effort? Our approach is to assess the overall content lifecycle, meet with all the stakeholders, identify needs, develop a strategy, and then execute the strategy. If you want a more incremental approach, consider these inexpensive first steps.
Adapting content for the U.S. market (presentation summary)
In this presentation delivered at tcworld 2014 in Stuttgart, Alan Pringle and Sarah O’Keefe discuss several factors that are required to adapt content for the US market. This presentation is especially relevant for European companies that want to enter the US market.
Risky business: The challenge of content silos
At Information Development World, I delivered a keynote on the challenges of content silos. The silo problem emerged as a major theme of the conference.
Webcast: Understanding the need for XML and structured content
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe provides a basic introduction to XML and explains how it could affect your content creation efforts. This presentation emphasizes the overall concept and has minimal technical content.
Content strategy burdens: cost-shifting
In assessing an organization’s requirements, it’s important to identify content strategy burdens. That is, what practices or processes impose burdens on the organization? A content strategy burden might be an external cost, such as additional translation expense, or it might be an internal cost, such as a practice in one department that imposes additional work on a different department. A key to successful content strategy is to understand how these burdens are distributed in the organization.
XML workflow costs (premium)
Everyone wants to know how much an XML workflow is going to cost. For some reason, our prospective clients are rarely satisfied with the standard consultant answer of “It depends.”
This post outlines typical XML projects at four different budget levels: less than $50,000, $150K, $500K, and more than $500K.
The companies described are fictional composites. You should not make any major budgetary (or life) decisions based on these rough estimates. Your mileage may vary. Insert any other disclaimers I have forgotten.
Fall 2014 Scriptorium conference round-up
We have a full schedule of stellar conferences coming up this fall. We hope to see you at one or more of these events.
