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Create User Manual Website with Sticky Index Menu and Scrolling Content

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

You must have seen user manual pages or online documentation guides with index menu in left/right side and scrolling content on the other side. Some of the best examples of product documentations also follow similar design for easy navigation. A short text in the menu area allows you to reach to the content a particular section using DIV tag. The complete document or guide content remains on single page but can be easily accessed using the side menu.

In this article, I will help you to create a beautiful user manual for a product or service with single page content. It will have side menu with indexes and scrolling content.

In a simple 4 step process, you can create useful documentation with sticky menu. Here are the steps,

4 Steps to Create Guide with Sticky Menu
  • Install and Activate Documentor plugin
  • Create Guide and Sections
  • Drag and Drop to Reorder
  • Embed the Guide

For simple products with getting started guide, installation, use cases etc. such documentation is very helpful. Customers find it very easy to navigate the read. This type of documentation saves time as customers don’t need to load many pages on the browser.

Let’s get started with easy steps.

Step 1: Install and Activate Documentor Plugin

Download Documentor plugin from your account area. Follow the steps mentioned under the installation guide to install this plugin.

Step 2: Create Guide and Section

Click on “Add New” under Documentor menu to create a new guide. Give a name to the guide and start adding sections. Single guide is made of multiple sections where every section will have – Title, Menu Title and Content. Section title is the headline appearing above the section content. Menu title is the short text appearing in the fixed menu. Section content is the complete text including paragraph, images, videos etc. under that particular menu item. Second section starts from where the first section ends.

Step 3: Drag and Drop to Reorder

On edit guide panel, use drag and drop on section to reorder them. Menu title in the side menu will appear as per the order of the sections.

Step 4: Embed the User Guide on a Page

Create a page on WordPress where you like to showcase the user manual. For example, if you create a page named Docs, it will have permalink as http://xxx.xx/docs/. On the text editor of this page, paste the shortcode of the user manual. Now the single page user manual with scrolling content and sticky index menu will start appearing.

With the help of DIV as a unique identifier, the content will scroll to a section as clicked on the menu. The menu location can be shifted to left or right from Documentor setting panel. The design is responsive so this user manual will open properly on mobile devices to and the easy scroll works there too.

10 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Product Documentation

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Documentation of a product is an important area where customers get self-help. Such guides or Knowledge Base helps in reducing support requests by 70% and even help in getting more organic traffic to the product’s page. People usually think that the online guide is just to dump the manual to read, but they ignore all the excellent benefits of having a nice and easy to navigate guides. That’s why I recommend checking some of the best examples of online guides to implement the best practices in your product’s guide.

Guides are helpful in many ways but sometimes you may not be able to find the required or expected help there too.

As a customer of a very popular marketing product, I was browsing their guide and found that the guide was not up-to-date and even the options appearing on the panel were not listed in the guide. That was very frustrating and finally I raised a support ticket. Well, support representative was quick to help resolve the issue but if the document was up-to-date, I would have fixed the issue by myself.

Create beautiful and easy to maintain documentation or online guide using Documentor WordPress Plugin
Common Mistakes in Online Documentation

If you are creating a product documentation, I would suggest to take a look at these common mistakes that people do while creating a guide or a knowledge base.

#1 Product and Guide NOT in Sync

One should release a new guide or update the previous one after releasing a new version of the product. I have seen some online guides explaining the steps as per previous version of the product. If the update was not big enough or not having so many UI/UX changes, then it’s okay but for major updates, the documentation should be updated. Online guide is having the benefit of being up-to-date without much effort and cost.

#2 Only PDF Format of Guide

Most of the physical products come with a user manual or a printed guide. If you will visit the product’s webpage, you may find the PDF format of the same user manual available to download. Even for physical products, I would recommend having a detailed HTML guide as there are many benefits of having HTML page as compared to only PDF.

Here are some benefits of having HTML Guide as compared to PDF only

  • HTML pages get indexed on search engines like Google
  • Get more Organic Traffic in product’s page
  • Receive User’s feedback
  • Let Users forward a section to someone and have communication on that

#3 Missing Navigation or UI Problems

User Interface is an important element of a documentation. Provide better navigation e.g. link to the parent section or category page to let the user navigate easily. Also provide a link to the product’s page as well as contact page on the guide section.

#4 Spelling Error and Typos

Product documentation should not have spelling mistakes or typos. Such mistakes look unprofessional and also impact the conversion.

#5 Only Text, No Image

People visit the guide page for help on a particular issue or question. It is always better to explain the problem with relevant images or screenshots. Such screenshots allow people to visualize the location and easily follow the steps mentioned in the guide.

#6 No Space for Visitor’s Feedback

Like offline user manual, if company is not having proper HTML guide and only PDF is available, visitors can not submit a feedback about the guide. Feedback is very important as it allows you to understand if the document was helpful or not. Based on these feedback, you can take step and fix the guide or update it.

#7 Missing Guides for Old Versions

Most of the time we update the guide with the information related to the latest version of the product. What if somebody is still using an older version of the same product?

e.g. 0.5% WordPress users are still using version 3.0. It means almost 300,000 websites are still using WordPress 3.0. That’s why it is important for WordPress to have the documentation of 3.0 live so that users can still find the help online.

#8 Social Sharing Options Missing

If someone found a very interesting tutorial on your guide’s page and like to share that with friends, followers or client, a ready social sharing buttons will be helpful. Such sharing will improve the page’s engagement and may help in getting new customers. Make sure to have Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit like social sharing and bookmarking site’s buttons present on the pages.

#9 Code Snippet without Code Syntax Highlighter

If you are having a software or web application as a product, chances are very high that the documentation will have good amount of code snippets. You can place the code snippets just like text but that will not look good and will not be very convenient copy and paste somewhere. Reason to put code snippet is that one can easily copy and use it somewhere. If you put the code snippet with a Syntax Highlighter, users will find the code easy to read and will be able to copy the entire code with single click. They can also find if any syntax error is there in the code.

#10 No Search Option

Search is an important part of the documentation as people will come searching for something and they should be able to put those keyword somewhere. Even if you have provided a very organized guide, there will e scenarios where people will not be able to directly find the relevant page. Search box will allow them to search and find what exactly they are looking for.

Conclusion

While publishing or releasing a documentation, you may have the idea to provide self help to your customers. The sole purpose of an online guide is to do so but there is more to that. Like the product’s reputation, you should maintain same kind of elegance and richness to the guide too. Above listed mistakes impacts the conversion directly or indirectly. If you like to publish and maintain the guides with a solid back-end where you can easily publish new section or page and also update the guide in no time, Documentor does the job for you. It is the most recommended platform to publish and manage online technical guides or tutorials. The platform is powered by WordPress so you get all the benefits of free WordPress Plugins and at the same time, you have an optimized product just to publish and manage a guide. With Documentor you don’t need to worry about above mistakes as these features come loaded with the plugin.

I hope you find the article helpful and avoid having such mistakes or errors on your product’s guide page. Have a nice documentation!

How to Host Product Documentation on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Free

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Product documentation is a very important part of the product release. A helpful document reduces the number of support requests and also improves organic traffic and sales. You need a web hosting server to host the online product documentation and there you need to pay a monthly fee as hosting charges. You may find some free hosting providers too but believe me, there is no free lunch. The free hosting provider will not be reliable and will use your site’s traffic for different illegal and unwanted things. In this article, I will explain how to setup and build a nice online documentation for your product and host it on the most reliable and secured hosting provider for free.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most reliable and secure cloud service and we are going to host a guide there. It offers 750 hours of EC2 service for free for one year. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a cloud computing platform for developers which can be used for flexible hosting too.

How to Create Documentation with Documentor Plugin on Amazon EC2

Documentor WordPress plugin allows you to easily create and publish product documentation or guide. It gives you flexibility to edit or manage the documentation without writing any piece of code. Here is the requirement to run Documentor.

  • Self Hosted WordPress CMS
  • Documentor Plugin

Install WordPress on Amazon EC2

You should have WordPress installed to get Documentor admin panel running. In this step by step guide, I will show you how to install WordPress on Amazon EC2.

Step 1 -: Sign in to Amazon AWS. If you don’t have AWS account yet, create one.

Step 2 -: On Amazon AWS Management Console, click on EC2 to open the EC2 panel.

Step 3 -: Click on “Launch Instance” to open the Instances panel where you can create a virtual machine to run WordPress on.

Step 4 -: Click on “AWS Marketplace” to search and install WordPress. You can see “WordPress powered by Bitnami” Click on the “Select” button available on right-side of the first result and move to the next step.

Step 5 -: Choose the instance type as “t2.micro” which is “Free tier eligible” and click on “Review and Launch”

Once you launch the instance, in next few minutes, you can see the instance status as running. Now select the checkbox available beside the instance name so that you can see all the details related to that instance. Here is the screenshot showing the details.

Copy the Public IP of the instance as that will be your WordPress site’s homepage address. You can open the IP to see WordPress homepage.

Time to Login to Dashboard

To install Documentor plugin and manage the WordPress CMS, you need to login to the admin area of the CMS. You need login details including username and password for the same. Default username for the admin is “user”. Now it’s time to find out the password.

To get the admin password, select the running instance checkbox and navigate to “Action ==> Instance Settings ==> Get System Log”.

A new screen will open where you can see the log details. Scroll down a little and there you can find the password written inside a box created with hash.

Use the username as “user” and password that you just got to login to the admin area at xx.xx.xx.xx/wp-login.php.

Install Documentor WordPress Plugin on AWS

Once you are inside the admin area, it works just like any other hosting provider. To install Documentor plugin, you may choose to use the Plugin Up-loader panel and upload the .zip file received after the purchase. Activate the Documentor plugin and start using it. With Documentor, your product’s documentation with an elegant and interactive design will be live in just few minutes.

As the documentation will be running on Amazon’s cloud service, you don’t need to worry about bandwidth, up-time/downtime etc. The service is available for free for one year. In that time period, you can see how useful the documentation is for your customers. Using the above steps, you can run a simple blog or even a startup website free for a year.

February Update – Documentor v1.5 with Clean Layout and Better UX

Sanjeev Mishra 11 Comments

February was a busy month for Documentor team as we released a new version with many fixes and features. The Team worked for the complete month and finally it is out.

Documentor 1.5

The new version of Documentor WordPress plugin is out with lot many fixes and few design changes. We started working on this version at the start of this month and the main motto of this update was to fix things. By getting feedback from our customers, we also improved the user experience (UX) of the plugin and made the design a little clutter free.

Find the complete changelog of Documentor 1.5 are as below

  1. jQuery should be loaded in head
  2. .close and .open class on admin panel should be renamed
  3. The ‘Save’, ‘Generate PDF’ etc. buttons should be inactive once clicked and the process is ongoing in the backend
  4. Change the position of hash
  5. Remove mail option
  6. Change the location of Edit
  7. Remove option “Extras on Section hover”
  8. Change the location of Suggest Edit
  9. Reduce the width of Search Box
  10. Fix for Documentor AJAX enable – Undefined link issue.
  11. Fix for Documentor Broad skin – Inter sections links not working (Add section A link in Section B using Hyperlink. Added link does not redirect.)
  12. Fix for Documentor – Inline section editor view and tags (Screenshot sent via email)
  13. Sidebar on admin should have max-width:300px
  14. Change color of Add Section button to Green Color
  15. Guide Name input box should be smaller and Save Name should appear as a link, not button.
  16. On-click “Add Section” button becomes white
  17. On Add Section window, no need to have Edit and Back to Edit both. Remove the Edit button and keep only Back to Edit and that should appear beside Insert with different color (gray will be good)
  18. Check the responsiveness of the edit window and even complete dashboard as the sidebar is overlaping with the left content area
  19. Use loader when click on “Posts” or Link” or whenever it takes time
  20. Create New button should be beside Manage Guides
  21. Search box should be ON by default
  22. Guide Title or Page Title Should appear on Print “center aligned” [Print Formatting]
  23. Link Icon should not appear [Print Formatting]
  24. Section title should be the Post Title for sections – i.e. if Section Title is changed the Post Title should also change
  25. Implement Docu_Install class for all future installations and updates
  26. Verify the Section and Guide Post Type parameters
  27. Indexing digit does not scroll with menu.[Broad Skin]
  28. Menu Position option is not working properly.[Broad Skin]
  29. Section title should be the Post Title for sections – i.e. if Section Title is changed the Post Title should also change [Removed Post Title completely from Edit Section]
  30. On Edit Section or Add Section – instead of ‘documentor-sections’, the label for the Post Type should be shown
  31. The title of the admin page for Documentor should change according to the page loaded
  32. Add action and filter hooks for adding extra HTML to the guide.
  33. The search term should be highlighted on search
  34. Search – If no results is found, display message
  35. Search – The searched keywords are highlighted in the guide
  36. Search – The loader is displayed while the guide search is in progress
  37. Search bar and extras – displayed when guide shortcode for a guide which does not exists is embedded
  38. The edit page for each guide has guide specific page title
  39. Changed – Change sequence of Guide Settings on Edit Guide panel
Show more
Show less

Better Search in Documentor

With this update, we have optimized the code a lot and made operations really fast. Apart from that, some visible changes are the placement of Search Box on the guide page as highlighting search terms.

Guide Search box considers section title and the content and highlight the search term, if found.

No More Data Loss

Few customers reported that the sections are not appearing on front-panel after reorder or save guide operations. We fixed that issue as well and now there will be no such issue on Documentor. It took good amount of time for us to recreate that issue but finally we did and it is fixed.

Auto-update Issue

Few customers reported that the auto update is not working. Well, that was because of SSL issue. We have fixed that and the update should work just fine at your end. Don’t forget to put the license key to get auto update for the plugin.

What Next?

Well, the first thing that we are going to do is to release a new version of Documentor Lite plugin which is available for free. Documentor Lite will also have the updated UX and design and is expected to release in next 3 – 4 days.

12 Best Examples of Product Documentation and Help Guides

Karishma Sibal Leave a comment

Besides a good feature rich product and amazing support; Product Documentation also plays an important role in terms of customer satisfaction and revenue. If there is no documentation available on the product site, customers will be forced to raise a support ticket.

Getting response from the support team may take some time and it may delay customer’s work. Self help guides allow customers to go through frequently asked questions and general queries and help them resolve small issues by their own. A good documentation contains easy navigation and clean layout with better readability. Step by step explanation with screenshots helps too. In this article, I will showcase some user manual examples or product documentation example to help you set a good goal.

Get Inspiration from User Manual Examples

If you are thinking that, creating a product documentation or online user manual is a very technical thing, I would recommend to read this Ultimate Guide to Create Product Documentation. A good documentation will speed up your product’s sale as well as improves SEO too.

Checklist for a Good Product Documentation Example

  • Easy navigation with clean UI
  • SEO Friendly design
  • Visitor’s Feedback with Comment
  • Code Syntax Highlighter
  • PDF Support with Branding for offline reading
  • Easy edit of documentation with in-built text-editor

Great Examples of  perfect Product Documentation and Help Guides:

Before creating a good product documentation guide, it is always better to see some inspirations. I have listed some of the best user manuals and product guide examples in this article to inspire you enough to start making your own. Many of these examples are of popular product sites and you may think that building such documentation will be a costly and time consuming task, but please read till the end as I have listed some simple ways to build similar documentation.

1) Stripe:

Stripe is one of the well known payment gateway used by many merchants. It allows individuals and businesses to accept the payment easily over the internet. I have gone through the documentation that was offered by them and I should say that the way it was represented was in a clean and easy to understand by the visitors. The API documentation that was offered by them was really amazing. There was a Syntax highlighter that was used, that allowed to display the source code in different colors as well as fonts.

Towards the left there were different topics that were listed by it. If you are planning to build a website related to API or where the source code is give much importance than definitely you should visit the documentation that is offered by stripe. The way the documentation for it was represented was commendable. There were different topics or the categories that were listed towards the left which is indeed eye catching for the visitors.

stripe

Stripe Documentation Example
  • API Documentation
  • Ease of Use
5

2) MailChimp: 

MailChimp is an email service provider that allows you to create, send as well as manage email newsletters. The documentation that is provided by them is very eye catching. It allows to add the links for the documentation along with Syntax Highlighter. Towards the left there are different sections that are displayed for the guide and there is different URL for each of the section. The documentation provided by MailChimp is displayed in very appealing way also all the points and instructions are mentioned very clearly.

mailchimp_doc

 

3) Yoast:

It will help you for the optimization of the site and also provides with the complete solution for SEO. Yoast provides with clean documentation, below each document there is a contact us form that allows to contact the support team in case of any of the queries. It also provides with a proper pagination along with all the categories that is listed towards the left. One can easily locate the category through the Search option present towards the top. It will also provides with the information when the document was updated lastly.

yoast

4) Microsoft:

After going through the documentation that is offered by Microsoft, it is very appealing for the visitors. It includes videos and images along with the documents that allows the visitors to have a better understanding. There are different sections for each of the category and there is an in-depth documentation that is provided by it. The thing that makes the documentation of Microsoft to be very appealing is the images and screenshots used by it. As images are always worth a thousand words.

microsoft

5) Apple: 

The way in which the documentation of Apple is present is really amazing. There are different points as well as instructions that are covered in the guide that is offered by them. Towards the bottom it provides with the feedback option where the visitors can share their views regarding a particular document. Also the users can add the suggestion in order to improve the particular document. There are also screenshots that are included to have a better understanding of the document that is provided. apple

6) Ionic:

The guide for ionic is represented in a very elegant way with the linking to the next documentation towards the bottom. Each of the topic is distinguished by different chapters and there are different icons that are represented for it. There is a sticky sidebar towards the left that is provided by it. There is a search option that is present at the top that will help to search a particular document very easily. The document is represented in such a way in order to make it appealing for the visitors and also it is very easy to understand from the perspective of the visitors.

ionic

7) Twilio:

The guide that is provided by Twilio is easily categorized into different categories. There is a Quickstart, Tutorials, API Reference and Helper Libraries that is provided by it. Towards the left it consists of all the sections that gets displayed based on the category that is selected. There are also different links that are provided by the particular doc and also consists of the linking to the next document. There are large number of sections that are added for each of the document that helps to have a better understanding. In case of any of the source code there is a Syntax Highlighter that is used for it.

twilio

8) Skype:

The user manual or documentation that is provided by Skype can be considered as a step wise manual with a complete understanding of the query that you are struck. Towards the top, it displays the count for the total number of articles. And there are different articles that are belonging to the particular category. There are different images and screenshots that are displayed for the particular doc. Towards the bottom there is an option that tells that whether a particular article is helpful or not. The way in which each of the step is displayed, makes it easy for the visitors to have a better understanding.

skype

9) WHMCS:

The documentation or the manual of WHMCS gives you the clear vision of the document that you are searching for. On the Home page of WHMCS there are different topics that are listed and one will easily find the document that one is looking at through exploring the following topics. Towards the top it will list out the topics with different sub sections. Under the documentation there is a separate topic that is present for the Community forums. There is a step wise explanation given for each of the topic for the How To Guide. There is also a proper linking that is given for each of the topic.

whmcs

10) Blesta:

The user manual that is provided by Blesta provides with a very good documentation that is indeed very simple and easy to understand. There is a separate guide that is prepared for the Users as well as Developers. As there are lots of sections that are present under a single topic, so towards the bottom it gives you the option to Show More. For each of the topic, it gives the details of the writer along with lastly the particular document was modified. There is a Navigate space that is present towards the right where one can search the topic that one is looking for. There are also breadcrumbs that are provided for each of the page that helps the user for the easy navigation. There is a tree like structure that is provided by this document.

blesta

11) BigCommerce:

The manual that is provided by BigCommerce is designed and presented in such a way to attract the visitors to the site. There are also links that are given for Chat and Community Forum in order to contact the support team in case of any of the queries. It also allows the user to give the feedback whether the following topic was useful for the visitors or not. The documentation also provides with different links in order to help the user to have a better understanding when they are referring to a particular topic.

big-commerce

12) Freshservice:

The manual lists out all the topics along with the count and sub topics for each of the topics. On clicking on the particular topic the user will be redirected to the page that one needs to refer. Towards the right, it will list out all the related articles along with the option to print the particular article. There are also different links that are added for each of the topic, it also allows to get the feedback from the visitors whether the topic is useful or not. It is written in very appealing way to attract the visitors and that will keep them glued to the guide. There is a different section that is present where the visitor can directly download the guide and go through it whenever required (for the offline reading).

freshservice

Creating Product Documentation through WordPress:

If you are planning to build one such documentation for your website than this can be achieved easily through WordPress. I would recommend to read this Ultimate Guide to Create Documentation to easily build and publish a beautiful guide just like the mentioned user manual examples. I have listed few free plugins to create documentation and along with that, check some WordPress Themes to implement a nice design.

Documentor:

Documentor is one of the best WordPress plugin in order to create the online product documents. There are different content types that are supported by this plugin such as videos, images, code snippets, Tables, Google Maps etc. The WordPress plugin is bundled with many features and to list a few of them includes:

  • For the offline reading it supports Save as PDF option.
  • It allows the users to submit feedback for any of the documentation section.
  • There are multiple skins that are supported for it to make it appealing for the visitors.
  • There is also a print option provided in order to print the particular manual or guide.
  • As Social Media plays a very important role for building of any of the site, so it supports Social sharing option.
  • There can be number of sections and subsections that can be added for the particular document.
  • It also allows you to embed the videos, Google maps and tables very easily with it.
  • Full control over the settings panel in order to change the color as well as fonts.

These are just of few of the features offered by Documentor plugin. This plugin is bundled with so many great features in order to create a perfect document for your site. A good documentation will definitely help you to increase the sale of the product. Moreover the content, images, screen shots and videos that are included while creating a document also plays a very crucial role. All the features that are provided will surely help you to build a document of your choice. Hope this post will help the users to build a better documentation and help guide for their site.

7 Documentation Marketing Tips to Speed-up Sales from Knowledge Base

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Documentation or knowledge base can boost sale by 70% and there is no doubt about it. If you create a good documentation for your product, your start receiving feedback from existing or probable customers. Those feedback improves the product as well as make your aware about the current requirements. Well, apart from these there are many other benefits of creating a self help guide for products. In this article, I will list the benefits a product based company can take from Documentation Marketing.

What is Documentation Marketing?

After purchasing your product, the very first page that most of your customers visit is the documentation page. It should have all type of content including posts, videos, screenshots, how-tos etc. at one place. It allows customers to use the product in a better way and it also explains the real power of the product. At the same time, you can put more add-ons and side-products in these documentation and boost your revenue further. As your customers are already happy with the sold product because of this guide, they will be happy to use your add-ons too (if required). Such marketing techniques implemented on the product documentation of knowledge base page is Documentation Marketing. A good documentation marketing can increase revenue by 60% (another example) in just a month.

Documentation Marketing Tips

We create landing page for product or keep sending emails to promote that. Many people spend huge amount on ads and social media marketing to boost revenue and growth of the product. With documentation marketing, one can utilize the already created platform and increase sales without spending a single penny. These tips will help in better utilization of the Knowledge Base or Documentation page and get more customers from there.

#1 Guide should have Feedback option

Communication is the key to success. In virtual world, it’s not easy to start the communication with your probable customers. When a visitor comes to your documentation guide page, either he/she will find the useful information or leave. It is very important to start communicating and find out the painful areas, so that you can provide a solution. Feedback form below the guide page works like a charm.

do_1

If the visitor or customer is not happy with the guide, he can fill up the form. Then you receive the feedback via email and reply back with the details. In most cases, you can convert that visitor into your customer by providing good answers and further details.

You can find a feedback form on Google product support, Apple Developer Guide and other popular documentation pages too. All these big players understand the importance of user feedback.

#2 Put Add-ons in Guide Page

do_2
BigCommerce is promoting other products and services on documentation page.

If your product is having some extensions or add-ons, documentation page is one of the most converting pages for such add-ons. Explain the particular feature or how-to and then put the extension’s link to get more features. If that extension is useful for the customer or visitor, you can sell the main product as well as the extension too. That will boost your revenue further.

#3 Put Detailed Documentation with Search Friendly Links

Detailed documentation is always good for SEO and will help your product’s landing page and other pages rank better on Google and other search engines. If you have more content around the product, it increases the chance of appearing on the first page of SERP. Better rank on search engines mean better conversion and sales.

#4 Videos and Screenshots

If you provide more videos and screenshots in the documentation area, people put more trust in your product. Documentation gives you a platform to showcase all these things and put tutorial and how-to videos. Such transparent details will help in making more sales.

do_3

#5 Put Live Chat on Documentation Page

People are visiting your documentation page because they like to know more about it. If you put Live Chat option on the page, you can interact with visitors and talk to them about the concern. That will help in getting more sales done. Live chat consumes time but at the same time, it increases conversion as well.

If your product’s documentation is on WordPress, you can use some free Live Chat plugins and talk to your visitors real-time.

#6 Allow People to Share the Moment

Imagine a moment when the customer got the solution from help guide. Now if he shares that moment with his friends and followers, that is going to help you for sure. There is no better marketing than getting a good word of mouth about the product.

Download and activate a free plugin named Better Click to Tweet and insert the shortcode at the bottom of the guide page. The tweet should read something like ‘ Documentation of Product X made my day URL #RelevantTag ‘. Such tweets from your existing customer will bring more customers on-board.

#7 Multilingual Documentation

Use Google Analytics to know more about the location of your existing customers. Analytics shows counties and geo-locations of your visitors and customers. If you have good amount of people visiting the product’s page or guide’s page from non-English speaking countries, get ready to make your site or at-least the documentation page multilingual. Install plugin like WPML to make your site multilingual and either hire or DIY the translation of the guide in popular languages. People love to read content in their own language and believe it or not, less than 6% of world popular speaks and understands English. Don’t leave the others at-least when you are helping with so much content for your product.

Product documentation is an important platform to boost sales and increase revenue. Companies tend to ignore this platform but one should not forget that maximum business you get from your existing customers. Create a good documentation or Knowledge Base for product to make it easy to use and to showcase other products and extensions. Documentor WordPress Plugin allows you to create and manage documentation without writing any piece of code and comes with features like User Feedback, Social Media Integrations, Print PDF option and many more.

Non-technical Person’s Guide to Create an Amazing Online Documentation

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

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.

A Sample Online Guide. You can create exactly same guide by end of this article.
A Sample Online Guide. You can create exactly similar guide by end of this article.

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

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  • Enter the guide name as per convenience (You can give it a name of your product)

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  • Under the guide, it is time to add sections. Sections are like articles about different processes e.g. Installation, Different Parts, Assembly, FAQ etc.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

7 Reasons Why Self Help Guide is Important for Any Business

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Whether you are running a product based business or a service based company, all kind of businesses need customers. Large companies appoint many employees for lead generation or to bring more customers through advertisements and other marketing techniques. In this article, I will explain how a self help guide of your product or service can help you in getting more customers without spending much.

What is Self Help Guide?

Self help guide is a form of portable documentation explaining everything about the product or service. You can create a self help guide in the form of a Knowledge Base with search capability where visitors or probable customers can read about how to use the product or what to expect from the service. Self help guide can also come in form of a PDF which can be available for offline reading.

How Self Help Guide is Important for Business

All businesses are for revenue and profit, and for more revenue, you need more customers. In the following benefits, I will explain how a self help guide can convert more visitors into a loyal customer and bring more revenue to the business.

#1 Lead Generation – Self help guide or a knowledge base with how-tos and FAQs are one of the most important source of leads. These documents bring more customers as they find answers of certains questions about the offered product or service. If the document is good, visitors will have better picture about the business that he is going to do with your company. Of course, the guide page should have a contact form to proceed with the lead.

#2 Advancement of Products or Services – By reading the self help guide, a visitor may ask counter questions on the provided solutions. Or in certain cases, he may not find proper solution. Sometimes by looking at the self help guide, a customer may suggest some improvements for the product or provided services. All these cases leads to a changelog for the business. Now the business development or product development team should come together and have a discussion about everything suggested by the visitor. Finally based on the feedback, company may improve the product or fix something in the process of service which will improve business in coming days.

#3 User Engagement – Self Help Guide creation tool like Documentor comes with User Feedback option on each section or question. Visitors can tell whether the document was helpful or not. If not, then he may suggest few things or just put a comment. With this feature on self help guide, visitors feel engaged with the product. Now company can contact that visitor with proper answer and in few cases, the visitor may convert into a customer. With self help guide, you can start talking to the visitor either in positive form or otherwise but in both cases, you are engaging the person which is always better for any business.

#4 Reduce Support Requests – This is a direct and quick benefit of having a good self help guide. If your customer or visitor can find most of the answers in self help guide, it is obvious that he will not raise a ticket. That will reduce after sale support on your company’s side which is a very expensive task.

#5 Product Placement – In the self help guide when you are explaining Product A, you can also provide certain benefits of using Product B or your company. Similarly, while explaining about your Service A, you can provide few benefits of using Service B along with A. As this is a guide, visitor will find it helpful and will go over to read about Product B or Service B. This is how you can utilise a Self Help Guide for converting more sales for the company.

#6 Search Engine Optimization (More organic traffic) – If you self help guide is getting indexed on Google and other search engines, it will bring more organic traffic. It is found that guides have better interlinking with the posts or other sections, which improves search engine ranking. If you have more pages with detailed answers, believe more, you will get more visitors.

#7 Feel Good Factor – If a customer finds help in form of an answer in the self help guide, it brings relief to that person as now he is not suppose to go through the long support process. If the customer feels good about your business, he will share good things with his friends, colleague or even with his own clients (in some cases). Good word of mouth is the best thing which can happen to a business. So a good self help guide or documentation or knowledge base can make your customers feel happy and that is the most helpful thing for all business, a happy customer.

It is very easy to create an online documentation using Documentor WordPress plugin. It gives you a great platform to create short, long or any kind of documentation in just few minutes. With ready designs and powerful panel, even non-technical person can create a helpful and easy to navigate guide easily. And the most important things is that it is very easy to maintain too.

Product Documentation is Boring? How to Make it Easy and Fun

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Documenting a product is a tiring and boring task for developers or people who are having expertise of the product. One of the reason is that those people are good in creating or using the product but have less interest in writing the process again and again. That’s why either they hire people to put the documentation live or just write few steps for the sake of doing it. There is no need to explain how important it is to have a good product documentation for SEO and for receiving user feedback. Also it solves the purpose of resolving frequently asked or basic queries. So it becomes a necessity to have a documentation along with the product and people start doing it just to have one.

In this article, I will explain how to save time while documenting a product and also easily maintain it without losing the fun part.

What are the challenges in Product Documentation

  • Boring Wiki Like Platforms
  • Repetitive Answers
  • Frequent Changes in Documentation
  • Time Constraints
  • Text, Text and More Text

Platforms to Build Documentation

Well, there are many platforms to create and publish a product documentation but most of the platforms are like coded in 90’s or something. Front-end at least looks good but the back-end to publish the documentation is really boring and looks very old. Some people even prefer to have a static HTML page rather than using those platforms. Now a days few modern web applications are available to create documentation but you need to spend a recurring fee every month to create and host the knowledge base. What if the most popular CMS that you probably are already using for your site’s blog or running the eCommerce site on, can help you create and maintain the documentation as well? Yes, I am talking about WordPress CMS where you can install a WordPress Plugin Documentor and have a nice, user friendly and modern product documentation hosted on your own server.

Documentor allows you to add the existing posts or pages from your blog to the documentation. It saves time and also the repetitive effort.  One can easily go and edit the documentation, just like a post and even use the drag and drop feature to reorder the documentation.

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So finally using the power of the same platform that you are already using and publish a product documentation in no time.

Why to Type Again, If you have already answered?

As mentioned earlier, sometimes you need to write the same thing again and again in a documentation which makes it boring. If you have already published the same content as a blog post, writing that again as a part of documentation will make it boring. If you copy and paste the same content from the blog post, it may cause the duplicate content problem for SEO.

With Documentor WordPress plugin, you can add already published posts or pages to the documentation or have the same section multiple times. It uses the canonical URL and send people from documentation page to the blog post. In case there will be any change in that part of the documentation, you need to make the change only at one place and it will start reflecting on all places via reference. It saves a lot of time and effort.

Products Keep Changing and So does the Documentation

If you have developed a software, you need to keep releasing new versions with fixes or features. As the product changes, you need to update the documentation too. With Documentor WordPress plugin, it becomes very easy to make the changes. Use the same blogging dashboard and go to the edit section of Documentor. There you can open the editor (same TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor) and make changes. The product documentation will automatically starts showing the last edited date on front-end which helps the users to understand that this is an updated documentation.

Save Time in Documentation. Invest More in Product.

One should not invest more time in documenting a product but in creating a better one. To avoid making the product documentation a time consuming task, one should efficiently document the best part or certain FAQs. By allowing you to use a single platform for blog or website, Documentor saves a lot of time from learning a new platform altogether. It also allows you to generate the PDF version of the complete documentation with just one click. Time saved again.

Make Documentation Look Cool

Most of the old documentation platforms allows you to add text and images or sometimes a video. If you want to have Google Maps, Nice HTML5 Tables, Embed Tweets, Embed a Presentation etc. these old platforms will not allow to do so. But with WordPress, you use plugins such as WP Google Maps, Contact Form 7, TablePress and many more free plugins to embed such things inside the product documentation created using Documentor. As you get 5 different skins to choose from for your documentation, the front-side of the documentation will look very elegant, stylish and modern with Documentor.

This is how you can make product documentation an interesting task without paying much (or any recurring fee).

Put Organizational Branding in Guide’s PDF using Documentor WordPress Plugin

Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

When you put product documentation or guide on your site, you prefer to have a PDF version over there as well. Sometimes visitors just download the PDF and read offline to get that printed. Documentor WordPress plugin allows to generate PDF version of created product guide and displays the same on the guide’s page. Generating a PDF is just one click away in Documentor plugin. Like the online version, branding is also important in the PDF version of the guide or help document, so that if the guide gets printed, the branding items such as Logo, Name of the company etc. appears on the PDF.

Documentor comes with ready options to customize the PDF with own branding logo and details. Also one can customize the fonts, footer text, header text, guide’s subtitle and other areas of the PDF. There is an option to upload the logo which will appear on every page of the PDF and the footer text will also be visible on each page.

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Why Branding is Important?

Well, as I have mentioned earlier in this article, branding such a logo placement or footer area text helps in promoting your product even offline. If someone will download the PDF and send that to his friend or colleague, the product’s branding will still be there and one can move to your site anytime. That helps in generating more traffic and sales. So here are few benefits of having organizational branding on product’s guide or documentation’s PDF.

  • More exposure for the product or services
  • Generate traffic and eventually more sales
  • Copyright protection
  • PDF looks exclusive for the product or the company

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Once downloaded, this is how the branding looks in the PDF version of the guide.

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Generated PDF will appear as a downloadable link on the documentation page. If you do not have the logo ready, you can use Header Text and Footer Text for branding in the guide’s PDF as well.

Requirement to use Branded PDF feature in Documentor

PDF branding option comes loaded with the PRO version of Documentor WordPress plugin. You only need WordPress CMS to install the Documentor plugin and use the branding features in generated PDF.

Get Download PRO WordPress plugin now