Technical Writer

Back in December last year The Content Wrangler judged a wiki contest.  This was an American Idol style contest, where the contestants (software companies who developed wikis) got up in front of a live audience and promoted their product.

For the most part, contestants … babbled on incomprehensibly
The Content Wrangler

I bookmarked the article and go back and reread it occasionally.  A lot of the comments the author made were relevant to more than just trying to pitch software. As technical writers we tell ourselves we are ‘writers’, not salespeople, but it’s a fact of life that if you want to succeed in any business you have to sell yourself and your product.

I don’t mean that you have to be a sleazy salesman, but you do have to

sell (your) value over the others and differentiate (yourself) from the so-called “competition”

as The Content Wrangler puts it, and some of the ways he recommends you do this are by …

Preparation, or lack thereof. The vendors who participated in the contest may have decent software, but you’d never know it because they failed to do their homework. They did not know their audience. They did not—apparently—practice, at all. They didn’t know what they were selling nor why we (potential customers) would want to buy it. They mostly touted features, instead of solutions to problems. When a problem/solution was introduced, it left you wondering, “Do these guys even know what MY problems are?”
 The Content Wrangler

If you read that paragraph above you can see that the comment could just as easily apply to a job interview, or a tender for a contract.  You don’t go to a job interview without finding out what you can about the company you are applying to.  You don’t go to a job interview without thinking about the work they want you to do and how best you can sell the fact that you will be ideal for the position.

You wouldn’t tender for a contract without preparing by finding out more about the work required and how long it is expected to take.  You would be out of business very soon if you did.

Good advice.

After my mention the other day about WordPress being a good, simple content management system a colleague introduced me to Joomla.

Joomla is more complex than WordPress but it has more power.  Because it’s a real content management system—unlike WordPress which is a blog with content management capabilities—you don’t have to customise it to make it look like one.  Other people have also created templates you can use.

Like WordPress, it runs on an Apache server with a MySQL database behind it.  And like WordPress, it is open source, so it doesn’t cost.

One thing I particularly like are the setup instructions.  They’re simple, direct, and even a little bit fun.

I’ll give Joomla a trial run and let you know how I go.