RE: Website Documentation Procedures - Educating an Employer

[Paul Hanson <phanson -at- Quintrex -dot- com>]

Collin,

You should be involved in the design of the website. You should contribute helper text and embedded user assistance (UA) so that the user interface (UI) is designed so that there is no need for online Help in the standard 'open a new window to read the help text' type of thing. Embedded UA is the way to go. Think about the fairly common things you may do online: buy a ticket for a WWE event, buy flowers for your significant other, or reserve a hotel room. How many times, during those tasks, did you see information you needed within the context of the fields you had to fill out? For example, when I went to buy a Ticketmaster ticket for Memphis in May in 2007, all the stuff I needed to know was there.

This is not a new idea if you've been to any of Scott DeLoach's presentations @ a WinWriters conference. Here's a link: http://www.writersua.com/articles/embedded/index.html to an overview of the approach. Here's a direct link to another presentation: http://www.clickstart.net/presentations/wwe3_embedded.ppt

Additionally, look through Jared Spool's website. He may have some info re: this. I'd look but I'm cramming 12 weeks of doc changes into today and Tue-Friday next week.

Paul Hanson
Technical Writer
RoboHelp ACE - http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/team_macromedia/robohelp.html
Quintrex Data Systems http://www.quintrex.com
email: phanson at quintrex.com



-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+phanson=quintrex -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+phanson=quintrex -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Collin Turner
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 11:21 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Website Documentation Procedures - Educating an Employer

Not that I hope to change anything...

I need to provide some solid 3rd party (preferably "official") documentation
procedures for providing documentation for websites. Specifically pre-launch
- at what point during the Dev cycle should the documentation be created,
reviewed, etc. Standard procedure for the Industry.

Anybody have some useful sources?

Thanks!

-Collin

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