Author Archives

• People read much less than you think they do

  By Carolyn Gronlund on December 6, 2022 • ( 0 )

  

  Customers skim your docs: “on the average webpage, users have time to read at most 28% of the words…20% is more likely…” – The Nielsen Group study

• Update: Don’t fear 404s – more reasons to rethink the redirect reflex

  By Carolyn Gronlund on July 28, 2022 • ( 0 )

  

  Since I wrote the blog post Don’t fear 404s & avoid unhelpful redirects, I’ve followed my own advice. Happily, I’ve found more reasons why you shouldn’t redirect every page you unpublish.

• Hoarder House: Technical Documentation Edition

  By Carolyn Gronlund on July 23, 2021 • ( 2 )

  

  Measuring success by the quantity you publish isn’t a content strategy. It’s a cry for help.

• The future of pants

  By Carolyn Gronlund on March 23, 2021 • ( 0 )

  

  There’s a lot of chatter about the future of office buildings. Me: I don’t want an employer living rent-free 24/7 in my home office.

• Don’t fear 404s & avoid unhelpful redirects

  By Carolyn Gronlund on October 26, 2019 • ( 2 )

  

  For tech docs, 404s aren’t ideal but they are sometimes necessary. Learn about soft 404s and why you shouldn’t redirect docs to landing pages.

• Need to report on tech doc metrics? Start here with some helpful principles

  By Carolyn Gronlund on July 13, 2019 • ( 3 )

  

  Discussions about which metrics to track and report can be overwhelming. So many possible approaches! Start with principles and the framework in this article to help you organize your thoughts and inform your choices.

• Terminology: A juxtaposition

  By Carolyn Gronlund on June 5, 2019 • ( 4 )

  

  Terminology choices matter. One of these could be hell on your cholesterol level. I suppose I should also mention mink oil, saddle oil, and bag balm.

• Revenge of the English majors – or – Why I don’t do STC

  By Carolyn Gronlund on April 30, 2019 • ( 2 )

  

  Part of my motivation for this blog was to fill a gap I see in the current state of technical documentation strategy and how tech writers are trained in school, at work, and at conferences. Technical doc strategy and authoring practices lag behind other web content. I recommend updating tech doc practices with content marketing techniques and data.

• Write fewer docs & win the internet

  By Carolyn Gronlund on March 19, 2019 • ( 1 )

  

  Your documentation will rank best in search and be easiest to maintain, if you don’t write quite so much of it. In this post, I’m going make the case for documenting fewer things. I’ll also show the success of a… Read More ›

• Good SEO is good content strategy

  By Carolyn Gronlund on March 4, 2019 • ( 3 )

  

  Technical documentation writers have good reasons to lean on SEO for their content strategy. Search drives more than 50% of website traffic. Further, customers tell us about what they want through search queries and clicks. Good SEO is good content strategy, not something to think about after your plans are set.