It’s time to put your product documentation on the web We have been telling companies for a long time that they need to move their product documentation out of PDF and Word files and onto the web. This has been true for awhile, but over the last 12 months we have seen the number of companies doing this start to increase. Here are a few reasons why it is more important than ever to move your product documentation to the web.

Your boss just told you, “We need to do some product documentation. Can you look into that?” It can seem like a simple task at first but quickly gets overwhelming. We speak with a lot of people who have just been given the task of recommending a documentation strategy for their product and they aren’t quite sure where to start. Hopefully this article will help you out a bit as you try to break the task down into manageable chunks.

Reasons to Protect your Product Documentation One of the primary questions we get when customers are setting up a new documentation site is "How do I protect my documentation?"

Over the last few years it has been interested to see the increased focus on self-service support options. Not too long ago, most knowledge bases looked like a glob of text vommitted out into some sort of wiki. Knowledge bases were ugly and, in most cases, ineffective at helping customers help themselves.

Once your knowledge base moves beyond a few FAQs, you will quickly start wondering about how you should organize your B2B software knowledge base. Many companies still implement a very flat structure in an attempt to organize their knowledge base — which is just a list of articles with no hierarchy to them. If you take this approach, you're really just relying on the search feature of your knowledge base since that's the only way anyone is going to find anything. A flat structure will make it very difficult for your customers to browse your knowledge base.

One of the main problems growing B2B software companies have is determining who is going to write the documentation. Everyone knows it needs to get done. Everyone knows customers want it. Everyone knows it will improve customer support. But when it comes time to write the articles, everyone seems to respond, "Not me!"

This one simple tip will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your knowledge base articles: Make sure that your knowledge base article titles answer a question. An example will demonstrate why this is important.

Writing how-to guides and product documentation seems like it would be an easy task. But most support and documentation managers quickly find managing documentation is a real headache. What begins as an informal process of writing FAQs and knowledge base articles quickly becomes a disorganized mess: The articles you really need aren't getting written The articles you have are out of date You have no process for creating or curating your content So we thought it would be helpful to share our process for creating help articles.

Some people think that ScreenSteps is just about adding images to your documentation. But there is a lot more it can do. The video below highlights a few differences between the Zendesk article editor and ScreenSteps including: Applying image borders Revision management Auto-numbering of steps Annotation presets Image updating Step re-ordering

Since the goal of a how-to guide is to allow customers to help themselves, most businesses only think of documentation in terms of how it will impact their customer support. But your how-to guides and documentation can also communciate a lot about your business. Whenever I am getting ready to start using a new product or service, I instantly look at the company's help site. Granted, I develop online documentation software, so I am probably a bit more aware of this than others, but a company's help/documentation site can tell me a lot about what it will be like to work with them. Here are three things I know about you if you have a great documentation site: 1. You are organized I have never seen a disorganized company put together a great documentation site. A great documentation site sends a clear signal about how organized your company is. A great example of this is the Van Halen Brown M&M's. Van Halen used to have a rider in their contract that required the promoters to provide a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown ones removed. A lot of people thought this was just them being divas. But Snopes explains the real reason: