The Value of Semantic Tags

So what's wrong with using <b>, <i>, and <tt>, anyway? What's so useful about identifying things as menu items, APIs, or filenames? Here's the list of reasons that surfaced at the recent 2008 DITA/CMS Conference. What are your thoughts?

Armstrong, Eric. Sun Microsystems (2008). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Semantic

Be Known For Your Content, Not Your Name!

Be known for your content first, for your name second. I can’t bear to hear anyone say one more time that “content is king,” but the truth is simple, if painful.

Content Strategy Noob (2009). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Writing

The Illusion of SEO vs. the Reality of Great Content

SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Search Engine Optimization

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

If content strategy isn’t in the current budget, though, how do you convince your client to add money for it? Your client might already realize content strategy can help create measurable ROI. If they don’t, help them understand. After all, relevant and informative content is what their audience wants; content strategy assesses the content they have and creates a plan for what they need and how they’ll get it.

Bloomstein, Margot. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Content Strategy

The Content Conundrum

There’s often an unsettling discrepancy between the stakeholder approved wireframes and visual comps and the actual product in production. What you see in those environments is sometimes a far cry from those polished wireframes and those shiny, pixel-perfect visualizations that were filled with placeholder content (such as lorem ipsum text, dummy copy, and image blocks). What you’re seeing in production environments now holds the real content. The imagery doesn’t support the interactions, is meaningless, useless, or worse, contradictory to the design intent. The copy, headers, and labels are unclear, too long, too short, or simply irrelevant. What happened?

Detzi, Christopher. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>Project Management

WebWorks ePublisher for Converting Documents to Confluence Wiki

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to experiment with WebWorks ePublisher, a set of tools that converts documents from Word, FrameMaker and DITA XML to a number of different output formats. One of those output formats is Confluence wiki. It’s been very interesting, so I thought I’d blog about it and see if anyone else wants to give it a go as well.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Wikis

Websites: Designed by Dogs, Managed by Cats 

Websites are generally designed by dogs. There’s a lot of optimism. The dogs look at the website and think of it as an endless attic. No matter how much stuff you into it, there’s always room for more. The dogs approach each design step with a ‘have gigabytes, must fill’ enthusiasm. And then cats have to manage the website. The dogs let everyone publish and the cats are certainly not going to review all this stuff. The dogs created an architecture where everyone can find everything and now nobody can find anything. The cats shake their heads.

McGovern, Gerry. I Heart Tech Docs (2007). Articles>Web Design>Project Management