About Me and this Site

Me

I am now a technical author living in Guildford, Surrey, UK and working in nearby Cobham. I work for COA Solutions and lead two other authors. Together we produce merged webhelp for two of the main products, the larger comprising some 12,000 topics, and merged html help (.chm) for the third main product. We use RoboHelp 7 for this work. In addition, we produce help for other applications that work with our main products or standalone. Most of the work is done using RoboHelp although for some products the work is done with Dreamweaver, this allows clients to customise the supplied help using any HTML editor they choose.

Prior to getting into the world of technical authoring, I was a bank manager (when people knew how to run a bank!). A bit of contrast. I spent the first twenty years in branch banking and then moved into the Bank's Video Unit producing staff focused programs. After that I got involved in work that led me to specifying the IT requirements for managers whose role was to look after High Net Worth customers. This required me to translate between userspeak and techie speak which I regard as being one of the technical author's main skills!

Then the bank made large scale redundancies and it made no sense to continue working there given the redundancy package that was on offer. A couple of contractors who had worked for the bank gave me some work and it all led to my second career and this site.

In July 2005 I was delighted to be made a Team Macromedia Member, since the Adobe takeover we are now known as Adobe Community Experts. For visitors to the site who are not familiar with what that means, let me explain. It is a recognition by Adobe of the time I spend maintaining this site and answering questions on the Adobe forum for their RoboHelp product. RoboHelp is a software package used to write help files for computer applications. Anyone who has gone into a second career will understand that I went into this thinking it would be something to do for ten to fifteen years after leaving banking. To get such a recognition in a second career is not something you expect and it is very pleasing.

I have been married to Gill for 36 years and have two sons, Richard (33) and Philip (31), and three grand-daughters, Catherine (7) and Sophie (3) and Zara (born 11.9.08).

The Site

Initially I created the site using FrontPage but I soon decided to use RoboHelp as topics relating to that product were the main part of the site. First I used X3 and then X5.

Now I use Dreamweaver with links to RoboHelp where needed.