Benefits of structured content
Structured content can help to improve the quality and delivery time of your documentation projects. It can also help to reduce your translation costs and open up opportunities for using your content in other systems.
Let's look at how these benefits affect the various different stakeholders.
Benefits for your organization
Structured content offers many benefits to your organization, especially relating to the efficiency and cost of producing and translating technical documentation.
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Faster and cheaper translations
Translation management systems (TMS) benefit greatly from structured content as the content is stored in separate components. This means the TMSs can quickly identify individual pieces of content and determine what is new, what has changed, and what remains the same. The result of this is often faster and cheaper translations. There are fewer words to translate because the TMS can identify repeated content strings.
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Content can be used as data in other systems
Structured content is made of elements that are structured according to predictable rules. This makes it easier for other computer systems to manage your content as if it were data. You can program external systems to process and use your structured content with little or no additional processing. This opens up a variety of possibilities, including transforming your content into other formats.
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More efficient documentation teams
Structured content is designed for creating reusable pieces of information. This helps technical writers, and other collaborators, to work more efficiently as they can reuse content that already exists instead of duplicating it. Reusing content also helps to reduce the amount of time required to make changes to your content.
Benefits for authors
The main benefits of structured content for authors relate to efficiency and consistency:
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The structure of content is enforced by the system (Paligo), so every author uses the same structure for procedures, paragraphs, lists, etc.
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Content is created as reusable blocks, so there is no need to duplicate the same information.
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It is much quicker to update content if there is "one source of truth" that is reused many times. For example, let's say you have one topic about battery disposal that is used in ten user guides. To update the topic, you make the change once to the original source. The changes you make to the topic also apply wherever that topic is reused.
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Authors can quickly assemble new documents, reusing existing topics and adding new topics where needed.
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Authors can focus on the content and its structure. They don't need to consider formatting and presentation as that is handled separately.
Benefits for end users
Structured content makes it easier for authors to reuse the same information, and this has benefits for your end users too. Structured content often produces higher quality documentation as:
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Content is more user-friendly
Topics should focus on a single user need, such as explaining a concept or describing how to perform a task. This helps to make content more usable, as it is more focused with stand-alone modules of information.
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Content is more consistent and more likely to be up-to-date
Styling and content are separate with structured content, so the formatting of the information is always consistent. Content reuse means the information is more consistent too, as authors can reuse text and images that need to appear in more than one place.
It's also more likely that the content end users see will be more up-to-date, as content reuse makes it easier for authors to make updates (see benefits for authors).
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Information is easier to find and understand
Structured content uses consistent and predictable structures. Information becomes easier to find and understand as your readers become accustomed to the structures.