MY PRESENTATION AT THE UPCOMING WRITERSUA CONFERENCE

I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to attending—and presenting—at the upcom­ing Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ence in south­ern Los Ange­les on March 13–16th.

I’m deliv­er­ing a ses­sion called “Using Web Ana­lyt­ics for Improv­ing Con­tent” in which I’ll be talk­ing about why tech­ni­cal writ­ers should care about web ana­lyt­ics, key web site met­rics that writ­ers can mon­i­tor, and how to set up web ana­lyt­ics for a web site or an online help system.
I’m equal­ly excit­ed about some of the oth­er ses­sions that are sched­uled. Here are a few:

• Com­par­ing the strengths and weak­ness­es of Help Author­ing Tools. This com­par­i­son includes Author-it, Doc-to-Help, Flare, Robo­Help, and Web­Works ePub­lish­er. Most of my career I’ve used Web­Works or Robo­Help so I’m def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ed in see­ing how the oth­er tools mea­sure up.
• Lever­ag­ing user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent in tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. If you’ve been mon­i­tor­ing my blog over the last two months, I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of entries about social media and tech­ni­cal documentation.
• Tak­ing advan­tage of HTML5. Par­tic­u­lar­ly I’d like to know if there’s any­thing I can do to incor­po­rate this tech­nol­o­gy into tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion deliverables.
• Writ­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for mobile devices. This includes devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Of course, there are many oth­er top­ics, includ­ing a lot of ses­sions on writ­ing, DITA, and oth­er technologies.