Having an online documentation for product and services can reduce support ticket and boost sales. It is a known fact that a mediocre product which comes with a good documentation or guide is better than a powerful one. Documentation allows people to understand how to use a particular feature. Now we know that a good documentation is required for a product, but you must be thinking if you can create a good one. Well, it depends what is your thought behind a good documentation. In this article, I will explain how a non-technical person can create a nice looking, helpful documentation or guide with online and offline readability and even provide some powerful tools to interact with visitors.
Who are Non-technical People?
Here in this article I refer non-technical person as people who are not familiar with coding and programming. When we talk about creating something online, people think that it may involve coding with languages such as HTML, CSS and even PHP. A non-technical person is one who do not know how to write these languages and how to even create a simple web page. But at the same time he is familiar with computers and probably have used application like Microsoft Word and Notepad.
How a Non-technical Person can Create an Online Guide?
A good documentation comes with good readability and proper navigation. Also it should have feedback option where visitors can not only read the document but also provide their feedback saying if it was helpful or not. Now you must be thinking how a non-technical person can create such a nice guide. Follow the below steps to create such a powerful online documentation with PDF generate option for offline reading.
- Download and Install WordPress using popular 5 Minutes Easy Install
- Download and Activate Documentor WordPress Plugin
- Once activated, click on “Create New Guide” button
- Enter the guide name as per convenience (You can give it a name of your product)
- Under the guide, it is time to add sections. Sections are like articles about different processes e.g. Installation, Different Parts, Assembly, FAQ etc.
- In one section, there are 3 different input boxes
- Menu Title – This title will appear in the left menu area for quick navigation
- Section Title – This is the title of the section and will appear as title in the content area
- Section Content – Here populate the real content of that section e.g. For installation section, describe the complete installation process in the content area.
- Add as many sections as required for your online guide
- Using drag and drop method, you can reorder the section as well. Use your mouse to pick and drop the sections under one guide and change the order. Once changes, do not forget to save changes.
- Once you feel that everything is done for the guide, it is time to embed the guide on a page.
- Copy the Shortcode (available under Embed option tab under guide edit panel) of the newly created guide
- Now create a new page on WordPress and paste the copied shortcode of the guide. It is recommended to choose full width page template for the newly created page as the documentation will look good on full-width page.
- No visit the newly created page and there you can see your complete online documentation appearing in a nice left/right 2 column layout. You can change the skin of the guide from Edit guide ==> Setting tab panel.
- It’s time to generate PDF version of the complete guide so that visitors can download the PDF and read offline. Go to the Edit guide page and scroll down to bottom of the page. you can see “Generate PDF” button beside the “Save Changes”. Click on the “Generate PDF” and you will receive a message saying “PDF has been generated”. Once the process completes, you can see a PDF icon appearing beside the email Print option on the front-side top-right corner.
This is how a non-technical person with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or other programming language can create a beautiful online documentation for his products or services.
Documentor also comes with other features to make your guide even better. Few important features are as below,
- Visitor’s feedback form
- Email option for each section
- Ajax Loading option
- Change typography, Google Fonts etc. from setting panel
- Format PDF with own logo and footer message
- Export/Import documents and guides
- Add WordPress posts and pages inside the documentation
- Add external links as menu item in the guide
Well, with these many features an amazing online guide can be created for a product and put online no time. The guide will be easy to maintain as you need to update the documentation time to time. Get Documentor now and surprise everyone with your online guide.
