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Subject:Re: Ideas for Help 2.0 From:Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:23:19 -0500
Just another thought to throw into the conversation. If you do
anything too "cutting edge" or complicated, what's the maintenance
cost? How stable is it? (Will having the wrong version/release of a
component break the system?) What browsers will you support and which
versions?
And bear in mind while you're designing it, that you may not always be
around to take care of it. What happens when you leave the company
and they hire someone else to maintain the flashy help that you've
built? I've worked with a number of remarkably UNtechnical technical
writers in my career. And I've worked on projects where it took me a
very long time to figure out what on earth the previous writer had
done to their files?
Whenever I do anything even slightly complex in a project, I always
leave a doc that explains what I did. And why. (Sometimes it's just
so that six months later when someone asks why I didn't do X, I can
say, "I tried that and it blew up in my face.") So while you're
building your kick ass help, remember to leave some breadcrumbs for
the next writer to work on it.
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Julie Stickler http://heratech.wordpress.com/
Blogging about Agile and technical writing
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