Making Every Page Page One

By Kourtney Short, STC Member

The ideas that Mark Baker shared in his Every Page is Page One presentation on February 13 are at once practical and exciting. He brings together ideas from usability, e-commerce, computer science, psychology, and his own extensive experience as a technical writer to suggest a better way to structure topics and documents.

When I write, I carefully sequence books and online help so that each topic builds on the last. When I use software, cook, renovate, or do almost any other task you can think of, I google until I can get what I want to done. Finding EPPO topics in my search results would certainly encourage me to look to the official documentation more often.

It’s never easy to convince a documentation team or organization to restructure its documents. Mark Baker’s presentation gave lots of reasons why it’s worth the effort. I liked that he didn’t gloss over the difficulties of bringing about the change on tight deadlines and in resistant organizations. (And reading his book gave me even more ideas.)

I look forward to writing some Every Page is Page One topics of my own.

You can see the slides from a presentation similar to the one that Mark Baker gave on February 13 on Slideshare.


About the author
Mark Baker is a Content Strategist and Structured Writing expert, and author of Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web.