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Slapping

Subject: Slapping
From: Misti Delaney <mdelaney -at- SOFTWARE-SERVICES -dot- COM>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 13:51:48 -0400

>From: RPRICE.UMI.COM[SMTP:RPRICE -at- umi -dot- com]
>Sent: Thursday, September 26, 1996 1:40 PM
>Subject: Re: Thinking ahead...


>re: slapping... yes, at least my dept seems too burdened to have time for
>advanced planning... and I'm getting down-checked for wanting to do some of
>it
>anyway.

>otoh, I like the idea of starting simple and planning for the inevitable
>jadedness of our readers. It offends me not to do the best job i can, but
>reality is...

>-becca




--- Begin Message ---

Subject: Thinking ahead...
From: Misti Delaney <mdelaney -at- Software-Services -dot- com>
To: Becca <Becca>, Price <Price>, "rprice -at- umi -dot- com" <rprice -at- umi -dot- com>, Tara <Tara>, "tara -at- barber -dot- ctext -dot- com" <tara -at- barber -dot- ctext -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 09:17:48 -0400




>----------
>From: Tim Altom[SMTP:taltom -at- IQUEST -dot- NET]
>Sent: Thursday, September 19, 1996 8:57 AM
>To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
>Subject: Slapping

>Did anybody else catch the InterCom article about "slapping" hard copy
>online? (I love the foreshortened use of the verb "slapping" to describe
>this practice.)

>The article, by Carolyn Coppola and Joanne Oakley, related a sequence of
>events we've all known. They had a lot of hard copy, no time to develop
>research-blessed online designs, so they slapped. They then endured
>sleepless nights worrying about user receptiveness, only to find that users
>were enthusiastic, almost wildly so, despite the numerous drawbacks they
>both clearly saw in the online version. As they note, it was probably the
>incremental benefits of online that thrilled users at first, although now
>apparently their users are getting more restive as it becomes evident that
>better delivery methods are available. You're only as good as your last
>version, I guess.

>We're doing exactly the same thing right now for a manufacturing client
>who's been sending out hard copy catalogs for many years, done in
>WordPerfect 5.1. Our first step is to move him to Word 6, clean up the text,
>put it into tables, and so forth. Then, due out this fall, we're PDF'ing the
>whole thing and putting it on a diskette. Granted, it's not breathtaking
>stuff from our standpoint, but for the manufacturer and his reps, it's
>awesomely advanced just to have a "find" function. Later plans include
>optimization for the online version and perhaps a database along with
>database publishing.

>One thing we're doing that Coppola and Oakley didn't is planning for the
>inevitable jading of the user. We know in advance that we'll have to top
>last year's achievement, and indeed we make it a habit to predesign so that
>we can implement tomorrow's neat stuff. Further, it lets us accelerate the
>improvements if the client becomes sufficiently impressed by today's
>results. For example, in our manufacturing project we're designing layout,
>styles and capabilities so that we can either directly PDF the file, or we
>can run it through a translator and create HTML. He's not wanting HTML yet,
>but we're making sure that when his company's Web site is up he can get HTML
>without hand-coding it.

>So how have y'all approached this, if you have at all? Is today's techdoc
>department way too burdened to even predesign?

>Tim Altom
>Vice President, Simply Written, Inc.
>317.899.5882 (voice) 317.899.5987 (fax)
>FrameMaker support ForeHelp support
>FrameMaker-to-HTML Conversions

>http://www.simplywritten.com/simply






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