Facttactic
Corporate and technical writers
If you need to move your WordPress website to a new web host, there are plenty of plugins you can load into your site that will do the job for you. But my experience, having tried a number of them, is of repeated time-outs, failed transfers, and restrictive data limits.
Last week, I took the plunge and gave it a go manually. It worked a treat.
[Read more…] about how to easily move a WordPress website to a new web hostSometimes finding the right word, its correct spelling, and its proper usage can be tricky.
Sometimes random writing styles from person to person in your team impacts negatively on your organisation, and what you need is consistency.
Here’s a long list of style guides to choose from that will help.
Just back from the TCANZ 2012 conference in Auckland where it was good to have two overseas speakers pushing us to consider ‘technical communications’ as a brand, even if most of us are so deep in the trenches doing the work that we don’t get often a chance to consider how to market our ‘profession’.
But that was their main argument — that we can’t really call technical communications a profession just yet, as it lacks the infrastructure that professions require, especially the standards, independent certifications and professional development that established ‘professions’ (law, accounting, architecture, for example) have. And that having that type of infrastructure is the best base from which to build the brand.
TCANZ this year has started a process to see what steps could be taken to introduce such measures in NZ and Australia. And, with training fairly ad hoc for most practitioners in New Zealand, I am very supportive of this work. I think with measurable standards we will be more clearly able to articulate our value to employers and clients.
The working party has though decided that the sector may be too small to support a full-blown certification programme but it is continuing its work to see what would work in a market our size.
A mentoring programme is one initial suggestion — so senior practitioners would help newcomers to the sector; and that sounds a good start.
Our technical writing services now live on their own website. The site has the very original name of www.technical-writer.co.nz!
The aim of www.technical-writer.co.nz is just to give our technical writing services their own identity. They’re a very important part of what we do but very different from our PR activities.
If you’re in Wellington (or anywhere in New Zealand, for that matter), check out our new website, or even visit our original technical writing web page.
Congrats to the organisers of the TCANZ conference for 2010 … great speakers, good turnout, comfy, well-serviced venue and interesting discussions.
Read a summary of each of the main talks here under ‘Recent Posts’.
The write-ups come from Sarah Maddox, a tech writer from Atlassian in Sydney and one of the speakers at the event, who blogged her way through the two days as the rest of us sat and listened to the speakers. Thanks, Sarah, for getting it all down for the record and for access to some really useful tech writer resources.
(Note: if you’re reading this post some time in the future [!], the posts will likely have moved on from ‘Recent Posts’ — search for “TCANZ” in Sarah’s blog ‘ffeathers’. All the conference posts are tagged.)
More young women are embracing online communities while fewer men feel their online communities are as important as their offline equivalents, according to a new study.
This is apparently a sharp reversal in attitudes and has taken place over just a couple of years.
Researchers at the University of Southern California say 67 per cent of women under 40 feel as strongly about their internet communities as their offline ones, while only 38 per cent of men said the same. In 2007, the numbers were just the reverse, with 69 per cent of the men and 35 per cent of the women feeling that way.
If the numbers turn out to be accurate, it could be a pointer to a rethink by us PR hacks over how we plan online campaigns.