My objective is always to help you create an effective document. I have three main criteria. The document must do the job you want it to do, your readers must find it useful, and they must find it engaging. After that, what we put into it is up to you.
Whether your objective is to publish to print, digital or electronic media, we can put together the right content for your audience, and put it together in a way that works for them.
Sometimes you need an Ode on a Grecian Urn. Sometimes you need a poem about a Greek jug. The difference matters.
I've been using Adobe Framemaker to write long documents such as books and manuals for many years. I think of it as a cart-horse with a diva complex. With the proper feeding and grooming beforehand, it will handle enormous workloads, and at the end of the day will deliver lovely pdfs and printed documents no matter where you send them: to your desktop printer, or to a press. If you treat it like Microsoft Word, it will probably stand on your foot and refuse to move.
Microsoft Press uses Adobe Framemaker to produce books and interactive training aids. Yet Frame's Spelling Checker still calls Microsoft a "microstate." Competition really matters, I suppose, and you get your digs in where you can.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) could make information desirable again. It's that clever.
DITA is, first and foremost, a way of thinking about information and about how we use it. Or, to be more precise, about how we would like to be able to use it. Next, it's a way of structuring that information, using a particular set of xml tags (i.e. which have a syntax and vocabulary all their own) so that the content they mark up will be bite-sized, and therefore:
I'll add more information about DITA, and the potential benefits to business writers and publishers, as time allows.
I use the term "coding" advisedly. I do not claim to be a website "developer" (I have no programming background) but I do build websites. I emphasize clean, uncomplicated code, for the benefit of we humans, and of the critters we've grown to know and love: the bots and spiders. I often code by hand and am happy working with css, xhtml, and xml. (Mark-up is just another language, right? Learn the syntax and the vocab, plus a few local customs, and you can be chattering away in no time. I confess it helps to keep a phrase book handy.)