Here’s your chance to be in charge. Tell a writer what to write.

Vote now on your choice of help systems.

This poll has been extended until Next Saturday. When the polls close you will get to see your Online Help System built piece by piece.

Come join us for this interactive demo and watch your the words on the page come to life. Participation is greatly appreciated!

Before any help system can be created, the subject needs to be defined first. Now that you know what a help system does and the components of the help system, we need to decide what to write about. I decided to

follow in a fellow blogger’s footsteps, “The King of Feedback”, Dennis Edell and let you decide what the subject of the help system should be. So, I can up with a few choice topics below. Pick one that sounds good and next week I show you how to lay the foundation of the new help system.

This is the first in a series of posts about creating an Online Help System. A lot of people are still confused by what online help is, as well as how to create the help and deploy it. Over the next few weeks I will show you how to create an online help system from the ground up. I will show you all the parts and pieces that go into deciding what to create and how to get the results for the end user.

Online Help Considerations

Before you start creating an online help system there are several things you must consider.

1) Decide what HATT (Help Authoring Tools and Techniques) to use.

2) Is there existing Online Help in place?

3) Is there existing user documentation?

4) What is the client’s budget?

5) Is there internal staff to turn the project over to at the completion of the project?

What happened to CreativeAce?

Hello everyone. Did you miss me? I want to take a moment and apologize to you for my sudden disappearance. A lot has happened in the last couple of months. Some good and some not so good.

Shortly after my last post, my site was hacked. After working tirelessly restoring the site to it’s former glory, I was hacked a second time in 10 days. Now some of you, I know, were also caught in this hacking frenzy.  While I won’t point fingers, let’s just say that restoring my site for a second time took a lot longer than the first time.

I discovered Ivan Walsh on LinkedIn. After following some of his comments, I realized he was really good at what he did. I’ve been writing for a long time and agreed with most of what he writes about not only in the forums, but on his blog as well. Well not everyone can be perfect.  So I asked him to write a guest post for us and he kindly did. So, read on and find out how you can make yourself indispensable!

Are You Indispensable?

Seth Godin in his latest book introduces the concept of a linchpin, someone in a company who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced, who is too unique and valuable to be let go.

For technical writers, this raises some interesting questions:

What can I do to make myself indispensable?
What tools must I learn so that I cannot be replaced?
Who will recognize this and see the value of my efforts.

Have you heard the term Go Green?  I bet you have.  It’s the new buzz word.  Everyone’s doing it.

I remember reading an email one day.  The tag-line after the signature block read and I quote: “Don’t print this email unless you have too.  Save the trees.  Go Green.”

I must admit that line has stuck with me since then.  So much so I pondered, where did this green movement spring from?  I mean everything starts somewhere doesn’t it?

That’s when I realized that Technical Writers started the Green Movement.  Trace it back, go on, I’ll wait.

Ok, for those of you who don’t believe me, I’ll explain.  Technical Writing isn’t just paper manuals anymore.  I know this from personal experience.  I can remember preaching Online Help (that’s another post) to my clients back in the ’90s.  I have been touting and sometimes cajoling clients for almost 10 years now into creating Online Help, web sites, and PDFs versus wasting tons and tons of paper creating a linear, not always easy to follow, paper manual.

I’ve talked about Online Help and what it was and how it’s used.  Online Help is a great tool for replacing those dusty paper manuals that have been cluttering up offices for year.  Online Help is created via a a software program. There are a few out there to choose from, but I have always used and continue to use and recommend, RoboHelp (RH). I’ve been using one version or another of RH since it’s inception by eHelp.

Background

RH was better off when still owned by eHelp. I mean all they did was work on this program and make it better and better. When it was acquired by Macromedia it stalled and the updates weren’t all  that.  Then again Macromedia was focused more on their web design products like Dreamweaver.  I often wondered if they just thought that Dreamweaver could replace RH.  It can’t and I won’t digress here.