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Fredrickson Communications

Technical Communication Articles

25 Tips for Better Web Writing»

by John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

Drawing on the recent work of Jonathan and Lisa Price and Nick Usborne, the research of usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen, and our own experience, we have compiled this list of 25 tips for writing online. This is the bread and butter stuff that everyone writing for websites and e-newsletters should know.

Automating Development Tasks for a Large-scale Help System»

by Bill Lindsay, Senior Consultant

This article summarizes one of the techniques that Fredrickson Communications used to automate the process of developing online help topics. Once the underlying structure and macros were in place, we were able to generate hundreds of help topics at the rate 15-20 per minute.

Stop Guesstimating, Start Estimating»

by Joyce Lasecke, President

If you’ve ever prepared a cost estimate for a project, you know that you can lose sleep over it. Did you think of everything? Have you uncovered the true complexity of the system? You can reduce anxiety by following a process that answers these questions and results in concrete and measurable information on which to base your estimate.

Warm, Warmer, Hot!»

by John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

Review of Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. Jonathan Price and Lisa Price. Indianapolis, 2002. New Riders. [ISBN: 0-73357-1151-8. 507 pages. $40.00 (softcover)].

Why Your Users Don’t Like FAQs»

by John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are everywhere on the web, used on all kinds of sites and in all kinds of contexts. From their humble beginnings in the early days of Internet newsgroups, FAQs have become a standard way of providing end users with important information.

But there’s a problem: users don’t like FAQs, at least not the way they are presented on many web sites.

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