Post project reviews: 10 things you have to fix

Posted on by Andrew Grimes
One of our clients recently confessed to me that they didn’t have a lot of faith in the value of Post Project Reviews. Time and again, they were finding the same points being raised with little or no hope that they would be acted upon in order to improve the following projects. This got me thinking about the many reasons why post project reviews might not be used to their full advantage. It seemed natural to divide the problems/challenges into those that face us as individuals and those that need to be tackled on an organisational level. Here’s what I came up with … Continue reading →

Seven steps to improving findability

Posted on by Andrew Grimes
Cartoon Man trying to find information in a bookMaking information searchable has never really been the point. Instead, our goal as online publishing specialists is to make our client’s information findable! After all it isn’t really the users’ fault if they can’t find relevant results. Even if they’re not using quite the right search terms or operators, it is our job to deliver them the most pertinent information in the right order, maximising the possibility that they will find the information they need. Search should be clairvoyant: like a magical librarian who somehow correctly guesses what it was you were looking for; offering it up within a fraction of a second, along with a wealth of additional filtering options and navigational possibilities. Continue reading →

S3UG 2010 – Project management with a mobile twist

Posted on by Alex Blackman
S3UG 2010 - Introduction SlideThis year’s Semantico User Group Event in Oxford was a practical and forward-looking day, with presentations from Semantico’s staff and clients. Originally held as a means for informing customers about the technical development of Semantico’s products, the event has since grown to become a forum for knowledge sharing and debate about a wide range of issues around online publishing. S3UG 2010 focused primarily on project management with a secondary theme on the growing importance of mobile devices and the future of publishing. Continue reading →

Quality assurance testing your e-publishing website with Selenium

Posted on by Nik Afentoulis
Example of a browser window displaying a web page As quality assurance assistant and junior developer for Semantico I spend a lot of time developing and implementing QA tests. Testing an e-publishing website can be time consuming. Even a simple test of search functionality has several steps; go to the designated URL, log in, search, verify the search results, check hit highlighting, start an advanced search, verify those results, check hit highlighting again, start another search with a different term… well, you get the idea. It’s repetitive. And there are many aspects to test, not just the search facilities. After a while you might find yourself thinking that there should be a more efficient way to test your website. You can hire someone to do all your QA tests for you of course. But will they test your website in an efficient way? Will they follow your test cases to the letter; the tests you have spent hours designing, editing and documenting? If only there were an automated tool to do all this – and one which did not require a degree in Computer Science to operate. Continue reading →

'Innovation from product to production' at the STM E-Production Seminar

Posted on by Richard Padley
Written and delivered in partnership with Andrea Powell from CABI, this presentation is a case study of lessons drawn from the CAB Direct project, and highlights issues which are relevant across the board for publishers delivering online content. This includes looking at how to maximise value in the design of taxonomies and coding systems, how designing and improving user experience on the product side can lead to more stringent data quality requirements and some design strategies to minimise ongoing operational costs when designing data transfer workflows between systems. We also look at innovation in the design of machine level API interfaces. You can watch the full presentation (45 mins) given to the STM E-Production Seminar on 3rd December in Kensington London. Please note that the video will be displayed in a new window. More on this excellent seminar can be found at The International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers website. Video by River Valley TV.