Are your content development processes manual, inconsistent, or unable to scale up to meet larger demands? If so, you may be ready to look into a smart content solution. Smart content — or content that’s semantically structured, modular, and flexible — can help increase efficiency in content production.
Your digital transformation is underway! You have a plan for new content, new delivery, and new content experiences. But what do you do with all of that existing content? You may have a plan for actively maintained content, but you also have much older legacy content. What does your conversion strategy look like when you have very old documents and must continue to provide them, even if they are not changing?
You’ve deployed a successful content strategy for one department at your organization. How do you know you’re ready to take that strategy to the next level and expand it across the organization? Here are some common indicators that it’s time to develop an enterprise content strategy.
Employees are (and should be) hired for their knowledge and skill, not necessarily their multilingual skills. In a global organization with many offices worldwide, the result is a diverse team with content developers and contributors that speak many different languages. Collaborating on content development—especially on the same document—can be difficult if employees do not speak the same language fluently (or at all).
“When you share content across the company in ways you haven’t before, everyone has to shift to a culture of collaboration.”
Undertaking a project to improve your organization’s content creation process is overwhelming. It is not easy to move into structured content, create a new taxonomy, or develop a new content delivery platform, for example. Here is a list of things to do before you start any content project.
Looking for ways to save your company time and money? Content reuse allows you to write content once and use it again in multiple places. Do these use cases for reuse apply to your content?
Do your customers know the right words to search for? Does marketing refer to your product one way while the tech team refers to it another? Inconsistent word use causes confusion within your company and negatively affects customers’ perception of your brand. So what causes the inconsistencies, and how do you fix them?
Elizabeth Patterson: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast. Brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way.
E. Patterson: In episode 51, we talk with vendors at the CMS DITA North America Conference about how they have seen DITA evolve during their time in the industry. This is part two of a two-part podcast.
Elizabeth Patterson: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 50, we talk with attendees at the CMS/DITA North America Conference about how they have used DITA in their career and the challenges they have overcome. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
Bill Swallow: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 44, we take a look at several definitions of content strategy. Do they work, and are they accurate? Hey everyone, I’m Bill Swallow. I’m here with Sarah O’Keefe.
Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 43, we talk about how to make sure you’re selecting the right tools for developing and managing content. Hello, and welcome. I am Gretyl Kinsey.
Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 34 of this podcast, we talk about inertia. It’s August, so here we are in the dog days of summer in North Carolina. It’s hot and humid, and doing absolutely nothing seems like pretty much the best and only strategy right now. That got us thinking about inertia in content strategy. It takes a big push to get a content strategy project moving, and a lot of times, do nothing seems like a much safer strategy than actually taking action and doing something. But of course, the choice to do nothing is, itself, a decision, and may lead to sunburn if you just stay out there too long.
The term single-sourcing is too simplistic to describe today’s content creation environments.
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 25 we begin an occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the traps, snares and dangers that the intrepid content strategist will encounter? What’s the best way to avoid danger, injury and even project death? In this episode we’ll focus on software and tool problems.
Markdown is a text-based markup language designed for content authoring. Using a limited set of formatting marks, you can create content and render it to HTML or another format.
There’s a growing buzz about Markdown in the technical communication community. While great for quick content development, there are some limitations to its usefulness.
The product content lifecycle should result in information that is traceable–each data point in a document should point back to a database or another information source from which the data point was derived.
But unfortunately, we are not there yet.
00:00 Alan Pringle: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 17 we discussed PDF. In a previous podcast, we talked about the death of training. So, now it’s time to discuss the death of PDF.
The scope and practice of content strategy is ever-expanding. From marketing to user experience to technical content development, the need for a strategy governing content creation and production grows. With this growth, the definitions of content strategy can vary, but they all recognize that the need for effective and targeted content is critical.
I’ve seen quite a few comebacks in my time, from bellbottoms to grungy flannel. But most of these trends are short-lived. A once long-standing staple among technical writing and content authoring groups has nearly gone extinct: the technical editor. Is it time for this role to make a comeback?
I’ve written in the past on how a QA mindset can improve the quality and consistency of your content. While having a robust test set and test plan are useful, there’s another tool that you can use.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Content creators love their tools. So much, in fact, they sometimes mistake selecting tools for developing a content strategy.
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
A common content strategy mistake is duplicating the look-and-feel of existing content when you’re implementing new tools and processes.
Getting your DITA content into a high-design format like InDesign is a tricky prospect. The biggest stumbling block is the fact that there is no intrinsic link between your ICML and the template that you flow it into. In the end, your InDesign template (you’re using one, right?) is the most important part of a DITA to ICML workflow; it contains the actual styles that will control how your output appears.
