Learning content professionals spend a lot of time creating content for instructor guides, presentations, assessments, and other deliverables. To adapt that content for multiple contexts, these content developers often:Executive summary
In episode 69 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Stephani Clark of Jorsek talk about using a scaled approach with DITA projects.
“The desktop publishing and single user tools are always going to have a much lower price tag than a DITA CCMS will, but there’s a trade off for what you’re getting.”
—Stephani Clark
March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.
In episode 68 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about unusual outputs from DITA sources.
” With DITA, it’s incredibly flexible. We can generate almost any type of output that we want to with it.”
—Simon Bate
In episode 66 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe discuss measuring content value based on accounting principles.
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?
In episode 65 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow talk about the need for a localization strategy.
“There may be things you’re writing in your source content that you don’t want literally translated. In many cases, there are stark cultural differences between one location and another. Writing something at all may be inappropriate for another audience.”
—Bill Swallow
Content value is a hot topic in marketing and technical communication. In the publishing industry, the connection between content and value is clear. A publisher sells a book (or film or other piece of content) and gets book sales, ticket revenue, or streaming subscriptions in return. But what if your content is a part of the product (like user documentation) or used to sell the product (like a marketing white paper)? In these cases, measuring content value is much more challenging.
It is tempting to fall back on measuring cost instead of value. The cost of content development can be a trap, though. Eliminating wasted effort and optimizing content workflows is sensible, but too much focus on cost leads us toward content as a commodity.
In episode 62 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion from episode 61 and talk about best practices for planning.
“You need to be mindful about how what you’re doing is going to impact other groups. You can’t just assume they’re going to play ball when you start rolling out a new strategy. Make sure they’re not only on board in theory, but that they are pretty much committed to the success of the project because they should have a stake in it in some form as well.”
— Bill Swallow
In episode 59 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Kaitlyn Heath discuss how you can apply the Learning and Training specialization to your content.
I think the conditional processing is a huge benefit as well. You can have a lot more interactivity built in without that human interference.
— Kaitlyn Heath
LearningDITA.com got a makeover! We rolled out an update to the learning management system to give you a better user experience when taking the courses.
