Who is Craig McNaughton?

I’m a highly proficient technical writer and web developer based in Saskatoon. I completed my technical writing program at Humber College in Toronto, graduating with honours. I’m primarily self-trained as a web developer, and have worked as a web publisher within a large corporation and as webmaster within a medical-doctoral university.

As a technical writer, I write and edit clear and concise procedural, how-to documents. I specialize in computer software and hardware and financial services processes. The process I follow to begin the documentation is to perform an audience analysis to determine my stakeholders and then create an overview of the necessary procedures, which leads to the document’s table of contents. Having completed this, I work with subject matter experts to develop the appropriate content. In doing so, I employ principles of project management to ensure that my part of the project is on track and on schedule with any other related work. I particularly enjoy designing effective templates for print and online user guides and writing blogs, news messages and other intranet content or business communication. I am also skilled at writing and developing business or technical presentations.

As a web developer, I specialize in small- to medium-sized websites, best suited for home or small businesses, community organizations, or individuals. My focus is not on the design, but rather on the functionality of the site. I prefer to work from a specific design and develop the necessary functionality and usability. Admittedly, I’m much more capable of making a website perform as intended than I am at making it look pretty. While I designed my own websites, including creating all the necessary graphics, I prefer to have the design provided for me. My previous fulltime work as senior web publisher within a documentation department included HTML, CSS and ASP (with SQL Server) development, however at the same I was also working on a number of personal projects. Part of my current work is to maintain the department website for an administrative office of a medical-doctoral university.

I’m interested in both writing documentation for software products or service processes, and developing functional, usable websites or web-based applications using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL.