Re: New to Industry

["Phillip St. James" <saint0 -at- verizon -dot- net>]

Congratulations on your new job and best wishes, Karen.  As for the choice
of layouts and the "look and feel" of your documents, here are some things
you might want to consider...

The attractiveness of printed or online pages is subjective.  Your company
has a style (or a number of styles) that is reflected in its people, 
customers,
existing documentation, white papers, marketing literature, ads, logos, and 
so on.
You may want to remain pretty much the same or you may want to "ramp up" a
bit to show a better "face" to the world, one that is perhaps more 
consistent.

MS Word is not the most flexible or powerful text layout and editing 
application,
but it isn't all that bad either.  My advice is to gather as many examples 
of
documents you find pleasing to the eye and try to replicate them in Word.

MS Publisher is a great source for sample Word templates that you can
easily fiddle with to customize.  MS Office downloads has some interesting
templates, too:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx

What you are also dealing with, perhaps without being aware of it, is the
need for a style guide that specifies how your documents are put together in
terms of text, graphics, frontmatter, backmatter, types of documents,
authoring applications, and other issues.

In a one-person tech pubs department, codifying style guide information may
not be possible while meeting aggressive deadlines.  But I think that you
should spend some time determining how you and your colleagues want the
documentation to appear and how effective/usable you want it to be.  (Tech
support customer and vendor inquiries/complaints regarding documentation
shortfalls are a cheap and practical way to measure the usability and
effectiveness of your existing documentation.)

Is there a budget for a temporary journeyman graphic designer to create 
and/or
modify some templates for your various online and printed documents? 
Professional
help in this graphic designer area will make a great deal of difference...

Hope this helps, Karen,

-phillip
Palo Alto



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