The Key to Organizing Web Content is Stickiness
The most important thing you can do to organize your Web content so that people can find it is to make it sticky. Making it sticky is more important than categorizing it or placing it in a hierarchy or...
View ArticleThe Web Leaves You Smarter, But Feeling Dumber
Is the Web making us smarter or dumber? Kath McNiff sums up the dilemma beautifully: I fear that the web is not making me smarter. It’s distressing my synapses and dumbing me down. Not because the...
View ArticleThe Nature of Hypertext
Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it Hypertext is something of a neglected subject these days. Everyone is talking about the Web, but nobody is talking about the class of...
View ArticleGetting Past the Linear/Hypertext Hybrid
A lot of the information design being done in technical communications today is what I think we can fairly call a linear/hypertext hybrid. Perhaps this is a necessary stage in our evolution from static...
View ArticleAny technology you use should be “Googlable”
‘Any technology you use should be “Googlable”‘. These are the words of Bill Scott, VP Engineering, Merchant | Retail | Online Payments at PayPal, as reported by the amazing Sarah Maddox. (I say...
View ArticleThe Role of the Manual and the End of Civilization
An interesting article in Popular Science charts the rise and laments the fall of the manual. Instructions Not Included: What the Disappearance of the Common Manual Says About Us, traces the origins of...
View ArticleGood Enough Solutions Fast and Easy
It is easy to set an ideal for technical communication that it should deliver the best solution — the ideal solution — to every problem. Many critiques of Web search as a tool for finding technical...
View ArticleSearch ranking and bottom-up architecture
Does a bottom-up information architecture improve search ranking? This is another in a series responding to questions from my TC Dojo series on Bottom-up Information Architecture. I have several...
View ArticleStructured vs Unstructured Hypertexts
One of the questions I am often asked about Every Page is Page One is whether it simply means write articles instead of books. But while articles are certainly much closer to the EPPO model than books,...
View ArticleTaxonomy Won’t Save Us
One of the great hopes of content management is that taxonomy will save us. Developing a consistent and rigorous taxonomy, it is hoped, will remove inconsistencies from how describe and label things,...
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