A wise woman recently said, “replatforming structured content is annoying and expensive.” This is doubly so when it comes to localization.
Replatforming nearly always involves content change—the new system may store content differently or require a different format or structure. Although the changes may affect your existing localization process, some of these changes may be for the better.
In episode 118 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in tech support.
“If you are delivering multi-hundred page PDFs to your tech support people, then I can assure you that your tech support people hate you. Opening a 600 page document and then having to search through it while you’re on the phone under all this pressure is not the experience that you want.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 115 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in localization.
“Using baseball examples isn’t going to work well in a country where baseball is not a thing. So you have to think about that. Does your text, does your content, do your examples work and are they appropriate in your target language and culture?”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 112 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow discuss content scalability.
“As you start approaching a greater percentage of bells and whistles in your process, the more work it takes to get each bell or whistle in place.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 107 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Gretyl Kinsey are back for another episode in our Content strategy pitfalls series. They talk about what can have happen when you lack a unified content strategy.
“One way to get funding in place is to start the conversation among different groups. Get these groups together and start talking about what their ultimate goals are with their content strategy and their content operations. That way you can have multiple voices coming together and asking for a larger pool of money that can be shared.”
– Bill Swallow
In this presentation, Bill Swallow explores the weird yet effective applications of smart content in groups outside of techcomm.
“Moving to smart content or intelligent content has largely so far been driven by efficiency. But the places that are looking at using smarter content now are less interested in the efficiency of that content. They’re more interested in the value that it’s going to bring.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 100 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Jodi Shimp discuss their experience with digital transformation and implementing a new content strategy at Crown Equipment Corporation.
“The initial and earliest win in the project was the go-ahead to even bring on consultants to help us determine what the scope would be and what the true need would be across all the different groups.”
– Jodi Shimp
In episode 94 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and David Turner of DCL take a look at content migration and discuss all of the players and parts involved.
“It’s not just about moving the content and loading it to the new system. You actually have to transform the content from the unstructured formats.”
–David Turner, DCL
Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.
When we look at structured content, the first priorities are usually efficiency and cost savings. These savings are gained through intelligent content reuse and automated content delivery. The implicit promise of structured authoring is consistency; use structure, get consistent content. But this isn’t always the case, nor should it be.
