The Simplicity of Dr. Seuss: Advice for Writers of Web Copy

November 29, 2009 Blog No Comments

By Ben Curnett, Matterhorn Marketing Solutions I have a great story to tell you today about reading and writing the world-wide-web way. A way that makes clicks and conversions and views fills metrics reports full of whopping good news! It starts with a plan to cut out the clutter and make your site sticky, like thick peanut butter. But first, you must audit- find out what you’ve got, and try to determine if you like it or not. Next step- you should cut… Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Rid yourself …

DITA Metrics: Savings Trend With Reusable Master Topics

November 22, 2009 Blog 4 Comments

By Mark Lewis, special to The Content Wrangler This is the second installment of the DITA Metrics series which examines the cost and reuse values for a DITA project to determine DITA ROI. The concepts and ideas discussed are based on the cost model introduced in the first paper, DITA Metrics: Cost Metrics – Part 1. This paper looks at the savings trend when reusable master topics are used to document similar products. How much does it cost to document each additional similar product? We’ll discuss how we derived the …

Translation Workspace Will Take Translators To Cloud 9

November 21, 2009 Blog No Comments

By Mônica de Oliveira, Regional Director of Vendor Management – Americas, Lionbridge My 11-year old son was preparing a PowerPoint presentation for school when I reminded him to save the presentation on a flash drive. He looked at me as if I was saying something surreal, and then I told him what a flash drive was and he said: “I know what a flash drive is, but why would I want to do that?” To take to school, I said (saying “duh” in my head). Then he gave that condescending …

Writing for Translation: Internationalization Skills for Content Developers

November 20, 2009 Blog No Comments

By Aaron Schliem, CEO, Glyph Language Services What’s wrong with this sentence: Some people prefer their coffee with cream and sugar, while others are straight, black coffee drinkers. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a translator who is not a native speaker of English but needs to transform this into a sentence that is accurate and stylistically correct in the target language. Unfortunately, to describe coffee that has no added sugar, milk, cream, etc. as “straight, black coffee” is not a universally understood noun phrase. If you were …

Unlocking the Special Powers of the English Language

November 17, 2009 Blog 3 Comments

By Jeff Deck, Founder, Typo Eradication Advancement League Since I’m both an editor and a writer, it would be fair to say that I think about words a lot. It would, perhaps, be unfair to say that I obsess about them, but not necessarily inaccurate. Caring about good spelling and grammar is, at least for me, just a subset of appreciating English in all its Frankensteinian splendor, and I’d like to address that aspect more often. Rather than pedantry for the sake of pedantry, I view typo-hunting as cleaning the …

Best Practices and Worst Mistakes Businesses Make on their Global Websites

November 14, 2009 Blog No Comments

In 2009, 1.6 billion people crowd the internet seeking news, information, entertainment, goods, services, social interaction, and more. These individuals are located in over 200 countries and territories, speak hundreds of languages, and have a combined spending power, both online and off, of more than US$35.7 trillion per year. How do the most successful online brands succeed or fail in reaching out to international visitors? Market research firm Common Sense Advisory answers this question in its new report, “The Top 40 Global Online Brands”. The report sets out best practices …

Leading Content Agency Seeks Web Content Strategy Guru – Greensboro, NC (full-time)

November 13, 2009 Blog No Comments

Are you a forward-thinking, experienced web content strategist looking for a great full-time opportunity (in Greensboro, NC) that will be rewarding and exciting? If so, drop me a line and let me know why you might make a good candidate for the job. Here’s a little bit about the gig from the company looking to fill the position: Our Clients Say: “We need to figure out a content strategy. We have existing customers we want to stay loyal and buy more stuff. We have a segmented customer base that we …

The Kindle 3 Parody: CollegeHumor.com Takes A Stab At Video eBooks

November 1, 2009 Blog No Comments

eBook readers are making big news in the publishing industry and in businesses of all types around the globe. Organizations small and large are realizing that in addition to the products and services they offer for sale, they are also publishers. As a result of this realization, we expect to see all sorts of business-critical content released in a format that can be viewed on eBook readers and other devices (smart phones, netbooks, laptops, etc.) One of the most common eBook formats is PDF, which provides much more functionality than …