Finding Ways to Help Sherwood AR

Posted by : Molly W. Joss

Providing high-quality and truly useful documentation is part of the soft cost of software development. It's difficult to prove that poorly written or incomplete documentation costs the company money, while it's abundantly apparent that the documentation development does cost money.

Thus, it's easy to see why software development companies seem to skimp on the dollars and focus on getting the product out the door once the product code is finalized. Until it's shipping, any software product is a financial liability rather than a source of revenue.

You don't have to be a financial wizard, though, to realize that well written, well-organized documentation can help reduce support costs and result in a happier customer.

After all, one of the first places a customer will turn to for help with a question is the help system or the printed documentation that came with the software. Companies have a chance to make a good first impression by delivering first-rate documentation.

It's not just software companies that need to deliver helpful documentation to their customers--not when almost every company on the planet has an intranet or Web site today. Help files that give information about a site and its contents are a must for anything more than bare-bones collection of information, whether it's a private or public collection.

Software companies can develop well-organized documentation if they usehelp-authoring software tools. (These tools can...

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