As Siobhàn reported last week, we’re reaching a fairly point with this new site that makes it useful as a resource for both new and experienced users. I think it’s fair to say we’ve still got some miles to go, but we’re now at a point where we can focus on making the content what everyone has always wanted.

Relations

As we’ve learned, the Search works across all manner of content: product information, news, documentation, etc. Now that there is some general structure to the site we’re trying to connect all the types of information you want to see. So for example, we have a new series of How To articles which we are linking to product info and ‘manuals’. We’re attempting to do this sort of ‘indexing’ with all our content.

We’ve also added some touches like a pop-up Glossary for common terms that we use with a certain ‘precision’. (As we so often say, ‘What is a ‘PO’ anyway?)

Favorites

Previously, you might find one useful bit of information in a newsletter. And then another in ‘the manual’. And yet another in a support e-mail. Over time, we know you all tend to gather a collection of these tidbits. So we’ve added a Favorites page in the Customer Area which will store all the topics you find useful. There is a ‘rate it’ button on each page where you can assign a page to this list and add your own annotations to each topic. This is sort of like a combination of a ‘like’ button and a Post-It® note. The feedback we’re getting is that this is great for getting new employees up to speed.

What’s New

When you see a topic that has been updated since you last visited, the revision date will be shown and you have the option to see the text which has changed (which I’m still finding a bit magical.) You’ll also be able to see all new content (more on that in a minute.)

Speak Your Mind

Another thing I’m spending a lot of time on now is going through the thousands of e-mails we’ve responded to over the years with ‘how tos’ and adding these to the, er… ‘How Tos’.

But as a rather famous person of Irish heritage once said, ‘ask not what…’ You’re a big part of this equation too! So we’ve adding comments to each page to let you give us your feedback on any bit of content. Things like:
1. Fixes you think need making
2. Areas we need to flesh out or make more clear

One of the biggest complaints we’ve heard over the years is that you don’t have time to do this sort of thing…and besides, don’t ask me to do your job! (Meaning our job.) Fair enough. Hopefully this system will make it easy enough to drop us a comment. As we always say: we want feedback from as wide a variety of customers as possible!

Get the Feed

Now the best way to make all this work for you is:

The absolute first thing you should do is get one of our feeds. We have several RSS feeds you can subscribe to to keep updated on our latest doings but the ‘all-purpose’ one at the bottom of every page is a good place to start.

(By the way, if the concept of ‘feeds’ is still alien, you just Google RSS reader. In one sentence, an ‘RSS Reader’ is a web page that shows excerpts of new content from web sites you subscribe to. You visit that reader page and you see in one place all that’s ‘fresh’ for all the sites you like. Convenient. If it’s still not ringing any bells, just think ‘Facebook Timeline’—they just borrowed the idea.

Even easier: just follow us on Twitter. Everything new is immediately tweeted there.

Newsletter Changes

One last thing: The last piece of the puzzle is going to be our Newsletters. For too long we’ve been sending out individual articles, rather than the good ol’ ‘Newsletters’. I’m told that (very) soon we’ll be back to a ‘real’ newsletter. But the newsletters now will be simple aggregations of articles you’ll see immediately via the feed (or Twitter.) In other words, we’ll make a ‘highlight reel’ every two weeks, which will consist of articles from the past two weeks. If you’re already getting the news in real time, you may not need this new format at all. Your choice!