Week 11 - The Value of Subject Matter Experts

I am learning the value of Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs (rhymes with sneeze).

As a technical writer who is fairly new to the field, I work with SMEs every day. In the strict sense, for my job, these are the business analysts and developers, but they are also my fellow tech writers in the office. I work with such a supportive, knowledgeable group of writers!

A few things occurred to me this week with regard to this project: a) I'm running out of time, b) building everything twice in "live" and "sandbox" environments is a time suck that I can't afford, c) I need to get help from a SME.

It's already week 11, and I have to present this Nicole at the beginning of week 14. Yikes! As worthwhile as it is to work in a sandbox environment, I was wasting time. I got more and more comfortable with Dreamweaver, and I'm very, very careful about "putting," and "saving" and working in only one index.shtml at a time.

Here's an example: I worked for an hour on a beautiful header graphic, uploaded it onto the site, and was not able to see it for another hour before I realized all that work was stuck in the sandbox and not actually on my live site. That's when I decided to scrap the sandbox.

I have spent so much time trying to learn HTML this semester that I lost sight of my project for a couple weeks. I don't have to know the ins and outs of HTML or be an expert in HTML. As long as I know enough, or can access the code, to make this project the best it can be, that's all I need.

If this semester was meant to be about learning HTML, I would have kept digging into the HTML books. But it wasn't!

This semester was meant to be about presenting my lovely tea research paper in a new and unique way, using technical writing skills and tools.

And as a technical writer for a software development company, I don't need to know the code behind the software. I only need to know enough about its functionality to write about it for the end user.

As a technical writer, working cooperatively with a SME to get the information I need is what I do.

That's when I decided to call in a SME of my own. My SME knows HTML, and I know how to pay attention to which code does what, how to copy/paste it where it belongs, and how to alter it for my needs.

When I described this realization to my SME, he gave me a patient smile and said, "I wondered how long it would take you to come to this conclusion." And then we got to work.

I asked, "How do I get a shadow to appear underneath all my images?" My SME gave me the code, showed me how to get it to work on one page, and I copied it onto every single graphic throughout the site.

I asked, "How do I prevent my internal and external links from appearing with a blue line underneath, and how do I prevent them from changing color after the page has been visited?" My SME gave me the code, showed me how to get it to work on one page, and I copied it onto every single link throughout the site.

I did this for dozens of coding situation throughout the project, and it is FINALLY started to take shape!