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Does your content process feel like it’s holding you back? As your content library grows, the cracks in your system start to show. Managing updates across thousands of topics becomes a chore, and consistency suffers. This is a classic content scalability problem. A proper content creation system is built to handle this complexity, but how do you know if yours is up to the task? When evaluating different content creation systems, there are effectively three things that determine the overall quality and efficiency of your work.
- Efficiency
- Flexibility
- Scalability
Everything else is details. These three factors are fairly easy to assess.
- Efficiency = how easy is it to reuse content and how quickly does the system produce your required outputs
- Flexibility = how many output formats are required or how easy is it to collaborate
- Scalability = how many collaborators can the system support and how much output (or throughput) can it easily produce
Efficiency and consistency are simple to manage in small teams. When there are three or fewer people contributing to your content creation, you can control consistency with interpersonal communication and peer review, even though the process is manual. It’s when you start to scale that these factors need to be approached more strategically. These factors are also achieved through reuses which, in most authoring systems may be difficult to achieve and manage.Flexibility is size and scale agnostic. If you need PDF, eLearning, knowledge-base, and chatbot from your content, it doesn’t matter if your team is one person or one hundred people. Scalability is critical when you are dealing with more than a few documents or a team of more than a few people. Once your requirements include having to support a large number of documents, you wind up having to look at: How do you support multiple contributors? How much output can the system produce at a given time? How easy would it be to reuse information in various documents without having to determine whether the reused pieces stay in sync? So, let’s look at some options for content creation systems and see how they stack up to these pillars. At the bottom of the page, see the infographic summarizing this post.
Building Your Content Creation System: Strategy First
Before you can think about tools or workflows, you need a solid strategy. A system without a clear purpose is just a more organized way to create content no one uses. Getting the strategy right from the start is the foundation for achieving the efficiency, flexibility, and scalability your team needs. This means defining what you want to accomplish, who you’re talking to, where you’ll reach them, and how they’ll find you. These aren't just high-level questions; the answers will directly shape every part of your content creation process, from the structure of a single topic to the architecture of your entire knowledge base.
Defining Your Goals and Audience
First, what’s the point? You need to set clear, measurable goals for your content. Are you trying to reduce support ticket volume, improve feature adoption, or onboard new users faster? According to Winbound, you should "set clear goals for your content." Once you know your "why," you need to define your "who." Talk to your customers and support teams to understand what users are actually trying to do. What are their biggest problems and questions? A developer using your API has vastly different needs than a new end-user learning the UI. Understanding these distinct audience segments is the first step toward delivering personalized, relevant information that actually helps.
Choosing Your Content Channels
Your content is only useful if people can find it where they need it. You have to decide which channels are the right fit for your audience and your goals. Will your content live in a formal documentation portal, an in-app help widget, a community forum, or a printable PDF? A good system makes it easy to share content across multiple platforms. This is where the power of a single-source publishing model becomes obvious. Instead of manually reformatting content for each channel, you can focus on creating great source material and let your system handle the delivery, ensuring a consistent experience everywhere your users look for answers.
Incorporating Keyword Research
Keyword research isn't just for marketers. Your users are searching for answers, and you need to speak their language. As Winbound notes, it's critical to "figure out what words people search for online." Do they search for "configure user permissions" or "change user roles"? Using the terms your audience uses in your titles, headings, and body content makes your documentation more discoverable, both on public search engines and within your own help portal. This simple step ensures that the solutions you’ve worked hard to document can actually be found by the people who need them most, directly connecting their problem to your solution.
Designing an Efficient Content Workflow
With a clear strategy in place, you can start designing the "how"—the repeatable processes that turn your goals into reality. An efficient workflow is what allows your team to produce high-quality, consistent content at scale without burning out. It’s about removing friction, automating repetitive tasks, and creating a predictable rhythm for content production. By systemizing your approach, you can move faster, maintain higher standards, and adapt more easily as your products and user needs evolve. The following methods are practical ways to build that efficiency directly into your team's daily operations.
The Pillar Content Model: Create Once, Distribute Everywhere
The pillar model is built on the idea of creating one comprehensive piece of content and then atomizing it into smaller pieces for different uses. As content expert Chelsi Jo explains, "long-form content lasts a long time" and is highly searchable. For technical documentation, a pillar could be a complete installation guide. From that single source, you can derive a quick-start checklist, troubleshooting FAQs, and individual conceptual topics. This is the core principle behind structured authoring with DITA, where you create modular topics once and then reuse them across dozens of different deliverables, ensuring consistency and saving an enormous amount of time.
Using Templates and Checklists for Consistency
Consistency is non-negotiable in technical content. It builds trust and makes information easier for users to scan and understand. Using templates is a straightforward way to enforce that consistency. According to Chelsi Jo, "templates and outlines remove the guesswork" and ensure a professional result every time. In a structured content environment, this goes even deeper. DITA topic types like Task, Concept, and Reference act as intelligent templates, enforcing a logical information structure. This level of content governance means every procedure follows the same step-by-step format, making your documentation predictable and incredibly user-friendly.
Batching Your Work for Maximum Productivity
Context switching is a major productivity killer. Batching similar tasks together is a simple but powerful way to stay focused and get more done. As Chelsi Jo advises, you should "set aside specific days to brainstorm, create, and schedule content." For a technical writing team, this could mean dedicating Monday to planning the documentation for an upcoming sprint, spending Tuesday and Wednesday writing all the new topics, and using Thursday for peer reviews. By grouping these activities, each team member can maintain their flow state, reduce mental friction, and produce higher-quality work in less time.
Can You Use Word as a Content System?
It’s going to be no surprise that Word largely fails on all factors.
How Efficient is a Word-Based Workflow?
While Word is fairly good at producing single unstructured documents, writers end up spending 30-50% of their time on formatting. You have to deploy templates and train teams to use them religiously. The content developers can also spend time trying to tweak the presentation, over concentrating on the content itself, which results in less meaningful information. Reusing any amount of content is achieved through copy and paste, which often results in content creation that becomes out of synch if changes occur. To keep the reused content consistent requires outside management methods which are error-prone and time-intensive.
How Flexible is Word for Different Outputs?
While Word is easy to use for a casual writer, the output capabilities are limited and you cannot change the look and feel of a document to meet different needs. While the PDF and printed page may look the same, if you need to create web output or online help, you’ll need an entirely external process to support this, and oftentimes, that system will be based on people copying and pasting content into it.Because Word is so prevalent in the marketplace, it is useful in terms of content portability should an organization be acquired or divested. However, rebranding the content, should the need arise, becomes challenging.
Does Content in Word Really Scale?
Because Word is designed for a single user, scaling to produce documentation for enterprise doc sets can be challenging. You need to develop external, elaborate processes and procedures if you want to have multiple collaborators and the application is deployed using a standard license. Using the cloud version could result in contributor collision that you’ll have to resolve.If you need to create a large documentation set, updating the resulting document is onerous. On the other hand, combining smaller documents into something bigger is challenging.
Are Help Authoring Tools (HATs) a Better Choice?
Some examples of HATs are MadCap Flare, Adobe FrameMaker, DocToHelp, and RoboHelp. These systems are designed to support the needs of small teams with low complexity requirements. Under the right conditions, each of these tools can do this job well, but as your team grows or your requirements expand, HATs aren’t going to keep up.
The Efficiency of Purpose-Built Tools
Similar to Word, most HATs use a paradigm that intertwines content creation and formatting. While this is familiar to most casual contributors, it results in the same problems in terms of the processes surrounding the implementation of templates and enforcement of styles and time lost tweaking the presentation rather than developing content. The advantage of HATs is the ability to build a larger document from individual components which can be a stepping stone to getting a team of contributors working in a structured, topic-based, paradigm. Most HATs provide the capability to apply metadata to improve searchability but may not be able to provide that information or capability effectively to the resulting output. Some HATs provide mechanisms for reusing content which improves the consistency of content.
How Flexible Are Modern HATs?
HATs do provide some flexibility to produce outputs. While their main purpose is to produce HTML-based output, most modern HATs also produce other formats, such as PDF as a side-benefit.Should an organization be acquired or divested, HATs will require one of the organizations to change their processes and acquire licenses for software so that all authors are using the same processes, which could become expensive. This could result in duplicate processes for a significant time during transition or, worse yet, the continuation of dual processes. Rebranding the content, should the need arise, becomes challenging.
Can HATs Handle Content Scalability?
Scalability is where HATs tend to struggle. HATs use a desktop publishing paradigm for content creation. This becomes problematic as you increase the number of contributors because the software has to be installed on each machine driving up the costs of scaling your publishing infrastructure. This model also tends to force your content creation processes to take a partitioned view of your corpus which inhibits cross-collaboration - your writers tend to concentrate only on their assigned portions of the corpus, rarely contributing to other areas. This lends to unfamiliarity in other areas of the content stifling your capability to cover that content development should any of your team be unavailable for extended periods, and increasing risk associated with a team member leaving the organization.Because access to the content requires the application to be installed on each machine that requires access to the content, content reviews become cumbersome. Most organizations develop a separate, disconnected, process for SMEs to review the content. With the comments divorced from the source, transcription errors incorporating the changes into the source files can occur.
Is Markdown a Viable Content Creation System?
Markdown is currently the cool kid on the block, it’s a part of a cycle that mirrors the boom-bust of wikis during the 00s. Markdown can be very efficient from the writer’s perspective and if your only output target is a relatively small, static documentation site, it can be a wholly functional solution.
How Fast is a Markdown-First Process?
From a writing perspective, markdown appears to be extremely efficient. However, the markup language itself is not intuitive for unacquainted contributors, which may actually slow down an otherwise fast process. This problem could be overcome by editing tools, but using WYSIWYG authoring tools that provide the markup capability makes the use of markdown questionable from a benefits standpoint.Reusing content is the copy and paste method which, as described previously, runs the risk of inconsistent content should there be changes. As with other systems already mentioned, acquisitions and divestitures present challenges for merging processes and rebranding content.
The Limits of Markdown's Flexibility
Markdown implementations tend to be single purpose, most often HTML outputs that are delivered with a product. Creating other output formats from markdown could mean processing out to HTML first and transforming the HTML to the other output formats or developing transforms from markdown to the target output form.There are a few things that could affect consistency. The first is that there are a number of markdown specifications and, depending on the contributor, the specification used might not produce the same output results. Structures that exist in one markdown language might not exist in another such that, when processed, can look significantly different.
Will Your Content Outgrow Markdown?
Markdown could be useful for organizations that have a large number of casual contributors, but may not be efficient should an enterprise need to produce a large amount of technical documentation for public consumption.The lack of strong reuse mechanisms makes scaling Markdown implementations difficult, especially when the content creation needs to support multiple products or audiences. Additionally, as content implementations grow, the number of outputs grow with it, this can be a significant problem for markdown implementations.
Using a Wiki for Collaborative Content
Originally used to share knowledge within enterprises, somewhere along the line wikis became a way to also share knowledge with customers by making the wiki server publicly available. The web-based, simple, collaborative method of providing information makes it very popular.
How Efficient is Wiki Collaboration?
Tools for wikis tend to be fairly intuitive so contributors feel comfortable and effective using wikis. The big difference is that wikis can be set up so that individual topics can be organized into a structure to comprise a larger document. From a writing perspective, collaboration is easier than the other options and, depending on the software used, can be enriched enough so content is easy to find. The metadata is applied to the topic itself, allowing you to find topics that are relevant using metadata rather than just plain text search.Of course, like Word, the contributors can spend inordinate amounts of time adjusting the formatting of the content to make sure it looks right. The only guardrails for this behavior is any standards or templates implemented by an enterprise and, unless significant time is devoted to the effort, they can be bypassed relatively easily.
Is Wiki Content Flexible Enough?
As easy as it is to collaborate, one of the bigger drawbacks of a wiki is that it is difficult to create other formats of output other than the presentation provided by the wiki server. Reuse is copy and paste, like Word, which causes problems when it comes to ensuring that changes are propagated through all the reused objects.Here again, the portability of the content and rebranding becomes problematic, especially because there’s no inherent way to reuse content without copy and paste.
The Scalability Problem with Wikis
Wikis can scale easily to allow more collaboration. However, as the number of collaborators increases, management of the quality of the content begins to decrease as the collaborators add information without validating it against existing content. Also, the maintenance of existing content becomes problematic because there is no way to make sure that existing content is up-to-date with new developments. This impacts overall usability because search can return conflicting or irrelevant information. Additionally, the lack of organizational tools means finding content grows more complex as the quantity of content grows. This results in the system becoming unreliable as a source of truth.Providing different output formats is challenging in this environment because most systems are not designed to do that; providing offline versions of the content might not be an option for most enterprises.
DITA: A System Built for Scalable Content
To be clear, we’re talking about the DITA XML standard and how most software in the market supports the standard. Besides being an XML application, DITA expresses an approach for authoring structured topic-based content. This article won’t go into all of the considerations involved when writing with DITA as those concepts have been described in books about DITA. There have been many articles and blog posts that state that DITA is hard. In reality, the difficulty resides in the requirements of the content being expressed.
The basic DITA unit of content is a topic. What appears to add complexity is the specializations of the specification that implement the other domains, such as learning and training and technical content creation. You can create any documentation without using these other domains and still conform to the specification and all the software that currently exists can process the content.
How DITA Creates Unmatched Efficiency
Where the biggest efficiency comes from removing the formatting from the content. The authors, whether casual or experienced can focus on the actual information rather than the formatting. That’s handled by the processing that produces the output from the source. Depending on the authoring tools used, the writing environment can look like Word and the DITA elements can be hidden from casual contributors.
Why DITA Offers Maximum Flexibility
Here’s where using DITA starts to shine. You can reuse topics in different documents or even use substructures among different topics. You can compose different output formats from the same structure, depending on defined processes, with little effort on the part of the writers. In fact, because the topics are independent of structure, they can exist in different topics and be profiled such that the topics can take on the context of the structure in which they are referenced. Metadata can be applied to the structure that binds the topics together, rather than on the topics themselves, so that the ability to find topics improves, even in a large corpus. Also, if the output enables processing, you can locate content on a more granular level, such as “show me all topics that talk about the xwidget user control”.
DITA has built-in mechanisms for reuse. Rather than copying and pasting content from one topic to another, you can create reusable objects that are referenced by the topics that need them and the output processing creates a copy of the object upon output. This feature ensures consistency of formatted content and ensures that changes are applied throughout any delivered documentation. The reuse features in DITA range from simple references to include chunks of content to more advanced variable-style content. This “baked in” reuse capability makes it easy to rebrand should there be an acquisition or divestiture. Because the formatting is independent of the source content, the consistency of is handled by the formatting processes and not by the writers, eliminating inconsistencies caused by writers ignoring templates or other style standards. Also, style changes can be implemented without author involvement, thus providing a way to pivot styles without disrupting authoring productivity.
Achieving True Content Scalability with DITA
Another major point for DITA is scalability. When it comes to scalability, it’s largely designed into DITA. The reuse mechanisms mean you can scale the quantity of content creation without incurring a huge maintenance overhead from duplicate content. The separation of presentation and formatting means you can scale outputs without having to modify or duplicate the content. Strong semantic and linking structures means that a large base of content can still navigable and searchable. And since DITA is an open standard, you can change or add to your tools with far less cost than other formats.
Optimizing and Improving Your Content System
A content system isn't static. Once you've chosen a path, the work shifts to refinement and improvement. The goal is to ensure the system continues to meet the needs of your content creators and, more importantly, your audience. This continuous improvement cycle focuses on two key areas: understanding what your audience needs and making sure they can find it. A system that excels in these areas will deliver a better user experience and a stronger return on your content investment. Let's look at the practical steps for optimizing your system through feedback and search visibility.
Gathering Audience Feedback
The most direct way to improve your content is to ask your audience what they think. For technical documentation, this goes beyond simple likes or dislikes; you need to know if the content is accurate, clear, and helpful. Integrating feedback mechanisms directly into your documentation portal is a great starting point. Simple "Was this page helpful?" widgets can provide high-level insights, while comment forms or links to surveys can gather more detailed qualitative data. Another valuable source is your customer support team. Analyzing support tickets often reveals where documentation is unclear or missing entirely, pointing you to the exact content that needs improvement. This feedback loop is essential for effective content governance and ensures your information remains valuable over time.
Optimizing for Search Engines
Your content is only useful if people can find it. Optimizing for search engines is critical, especially for self-service support portals. A helpful framework for structuring individual content pieces is "Why, What, How." Why should the user care? What are the key takeaways? How can they apply the information? This structure naturally creates clear, scannable content that performs well in search. To take it a step further, think about formatting answers for featured snippets or "Google Answer Boxes." These are the direct answers that appear at the top of search results. Using structured content like DITA gives you a significant advantage here. Because the content is modular and semantically tagged, it’s already optimized for machines to understand and pull out as a precise answer, making it much easier for your documentation to rank for specific user questions.
How to Choose the Right Content System
There are pluses and minuses to any content creation format. When it comes to technical content, these are the general conclusions for each of the discussed formats:
- Microsoft Word: Not really appropriate for technical content creation.
- Help Authoring Tools: Can work well for small, isolated teams. Struggle with collaboration.
- Markdown: Great for developer groups with single output targets. Lack of strong structure and reuse mechanisms make scaling difficult.
- Wikis: Good for small, internal teams, or well defined collaborative spaces. Not well suited for enterprise-scale technical content.
- DITA: Structure presents a learning curve for new authors, but enables long term maintainability and scalability.
DITA, proprietary content creation in HATs, and Markdown are all viable documentation formats, Microsoft Word and Wikis less so. Each of these options comes with tradeoffs. DITA is the best choice for larger or more complex documentation sets.Ready to see DITA in action? Whether you are a small team or a large one, If you have notable publishing demands or complex documentation sets, Heretto provides the ultimate tool for technical communications teams ready to take the next step towards intelligent, structured content.
Frequently Asked Questions
My team is small. Do we really need a complex system like DITA? That’s the key question, isn't it? For a very small team with one writer and a single output like a PDF, a simpler Help Authoring Tool can work just fine. The tipping point comes when your needs start to grow. If you find yourself needing to publish the same information to a help portal and a PDF, or if your team grows to three or more writers, the cracks in a simpler system start to show. DITA is built for that complexity from the ground up, so it’s a system you grow into, not one you’ll quickly grow out of.
What's the real-world difference between 'copy-paste' reuse and the reuse you get with DITA? Think of it this way: copy-paste reuse is like making a bunch of photocopies of a document. If you find a typo in the original, you have to track down every single copy and fix it manually. DITA’s reuse is different; it’s like creating a single, master block of text and then placing a reference to it everywhere it’s needed. If you update that master block, the change automatically appears in every single place it's used. This saves an incredible amount of time and ensures your content is always consistent.
You talk about separating content from formatting. What does that actually look like for a writer? It means you get to stop worrying about fonts, margins, and page breaks and focus entirely on the quality of your writing. Instead of tweaking styles, you simply identify what kind of information you're writing—is it a step-by-step task, a high-level concept, or a technical reference? You write the content, and the system handles all the publishing magic. It takes that single source of content and automatically formats it perfectly for a PDF, a website, or any other output you need, which is a huge efficiency gain.
Is it difficult to switch from a system like Word or a HAT to DITA? There is a learning curve, but it’s less about learning complex code and more about shifting your mindset. You move from thinking about how a document looks to thinking about what the information is. Modern DITA authoring tools are designed to feel familiar, often looking and feeling a lot like a standard word processor. The initial adjustment period is a small price to pay for the long-term benefits of scalability and consistency that you’ll gain.
If DITA is an open standard, why do I need a specific tool to manage it? DITA is the set of rules and the blueprint for structuring your content, which is great because it means you’re never locked into a single vendor. A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is the workshop that gives you all the power tools to work with that blueprint. It provides the user-friendly authoring environment, the collaboration and review workflows, version control, and the powerful publishing engines you need to manage thousands of topics and deliver them to your audience. The standard provides the foundation; the tool provides the capability.
Key Takeaways
- Evaluate any content system on three core principles: Your decision should come down to efficiency (ease of reuse), flexibility (number of output formats), and scalability (support for more content and collaborators).
- Understand the trade-offs of simpler tools: Systems like Word, Markdown, and wikis are accessible but struggle with reuse and consistency, creating significant maintenance challenges as your content library expands.
- Separate content from formatting for long-term success: Adopting a structured content approach like DITA is the most effective way to manage complex documentation, enabling true content reuse and ensuring consistency across all outputs without manual rework.
