In episode 125 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Amy Williams of DCL talk about digital transformation projects and how structured content provides the foundation for those efforts.
If, as a company, you start to think and plan and build processes with the digital innovation, you really start to future-proof for yourself, because you’re going to become more agile, more flexible.
– Amy Williams
In episode 123 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey wrap up our series on content ops stakeholders and continue their discussion about content authors.
“When you are trying to get executive buy-in on something as a content creator, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. That is not the way to get the attention of executives. ”
– Alan Pringle
We’ve had the pleasure of implementing DITA in many companies both large and small. Unfortunately, writers almost always have some trepidation about the move. At the same time, there’s a lot for writers to get excited about!
Here are some common remarks from writers—along with responses to encourage a positive outlook about the change.
If you were an early adopter of structured content, there’s a good chance that you have a custom XML content model. This article describes the process Scriptorium uses to make a shift from custom XML into DITA.
In this presentation, Bill Swallow explores the weird yet effective applications of smart content in groups outside of techcomm.
“Moving to smart content or intelligent content has largely so far been driven by efficiency. But the places that are looking at using smarter content now are less interested in the efficiency of that content. They’re more interested in the value that it’s going to bring.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 98 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech continue their discussion about the pros and cons of markdown.
“If you want to make a website and you need to write the text in a fast way that does not involve adding a lot of the brackets that are in HTML syntax, I think that’s the main use for markdown.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
In episode 97 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech discuss the pros and cons of markdown.
“I think markdown has a huge user base because most people need to develop content for the web. But there’s a set of people that need to be working in something more structured for a variety of reasons, and those are the ones who use DITA.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
In episode 87 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Nenad Furtula of Bluestream talk about finding the value when selling structure. Why do so many tech pubs departments fail to get support for structured content and what can we potentially do to change that?
