Don’t miss Joe presenting on Day 3 of Adobe DITA World 2017 (12 October): October 12, 2017, at 14:00 pm Pacific Time
Joe combines expert judgment of technical approaches with a primary focus on the human users and collaborative interactions that underlie any successful information management project involving technology. Just recently, Joe was awarded as one of the 25 most influential Content Experience Influencer in the world by MindTouch.
Give Your DITA Wings with Taxonomy and Modern Web Design
In the crowded marketplace of information, effective web design is as much about structured data and purposeful content as it about slick UIs. Using DITA for web content gives us some distinct searchability and usability advantages – should we choose to use them.
Many websites look less complicated than they used to. The easiest way to do mobile-friendly design is to reduce complexity on all screen sizes and platforms, not split off separate mobile sites with reduced functionality. On sites that still look complex, many readers enforce their own simple UX – they view pages in their browser’s Reader mode, or via an in-app browser that does the same thing. Google themselves have joined the readability party by driving the AMP project: the standard for the simple pages that come at the top of Google searches on a phone or tablet. The content itself is clearly what users and search engines are interested in, and that can put DITA users at an advantage.
Users search with a purpose, and Google seeks to match that purpose with relevant results. Good DITA content is crafted with a clear purpose in mind: the original goal of topic-based writing. Yet, conflicting priorities such as maximizing reuse and delivering traditional, book-focused information can dilute that sense of purpose. The focus can be restored by applying a taxonomy that maps users’ common tasks and their preferred terms for those tasks. This taxonomy can also provide new ways for readers (and bots!) to find and navigate information.
Users search not only with tasks in mind but also the real-world products, platforms, and places that relate to those tasks. Google and other search engines read metadata –“structured data” – in your web content to surface information about the right things. This increases your ranking and can make links to your pages more visually attractive. But supplying this data at scale is a major challenge for many organizations. DITA markup already describes what each chunk of text is about, so we can transform it into structured data for richer, more relevant search results. We can even link DITA with taxonomy data to make sure that Google and searchers alike find exactly the right information in the chaotic, bustling bazaar that is today’s web.
Joe will demonstrate how DITA content can be automatically transformed to DITA markup in the industry-leading Web CMS Adobe Experience Manager, and show how taxonomy can not only give your content focus but also help searchers, search engines and bots alike.
Make sure you do not miss Joe’s session and register now for free at www.dita-world.com!
About Adobe DITA World 2017
More than 1,400 marketing and technical communication experts from all over the world attended the first Adobe DITA World in 2016. The recordings from the sessions are available on YouTube.
From October 10–12, 2017, Adobe is going to host the second Adobe DITA World Online Conference. We will offer a comprehensive program with the world’s leading Technical Communication, Marketing, XML, DITA©, Content Management and Translation experts about DITA, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe’s DITA CCMS (XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager) and many additional solutions in the content ecosystem.
The program offers a wide range of topics, from high-level strategic approaches to very practical sessions. We will discuss how Adobe is helping to connect the dots between Technical Communication and Marketing Communication and help you to create new customer experiences.