Category: How To

Is it possible to create Zendesk Knowledge Base guide using WordPress? I guess this question is been asked worldwide by the WordPress users. Therefore the answer to this is YES! So today we’ll look at some of the alternatives to create Zendesk like Knowledge Base using WordPress. But before that let us see why Zendesk is so popular.

Zendesk knowledge base guide:

Knowledge Base is the centralized repository of information which is publicly available to the employees and customers. The information maybe regarding the specific product or the services the company provides. Zendesk is well known for creating a good Knowledge Base. It is one of the most popular helpdesk software. It also allows the customers to create a Knowledge Base on their platform.

Here’s what the Zendesk says:

Our customer service and engagement products are powerful and flexible, and scale to meet the needs of any business.

Zendesk has a robust and flexible customer service and engagement platform scales to meet the needs of any business, from startups and small businesses to growth companies and enterprises. But the issue is its pricing. per-seat licensing has been a great way for companies like Zendesk to charge a subscription and collect revenue. Zendesk, therefore, becomes more and more expensive for companies with a low budget.

But what if you can create the same environment to create Zendesk knowledge base guide like structure on your WordPress. Yes, you got me right. There are some plugins that are meant for building the Knowledge Base.

• Documentor
• weDocs
• Knowledge Center
• Helpscout
• Document 360
• WP Docs

Create Zendesk like Knowledge Base using WordPress:

As mentioned above, there are plugins available at WordPress.org to create guides. If you are willing to create a single page guide then Documentor works the best in this case.

Documentor

It is a plugin which is easy to use and create single page guides. Documentor comes with two versions, lighter and the PRO version. You can create a single guide in the lighter version whereas unlimited guides in the PRO version.

Documentor is a great solution for creating a knowledge base like Zendesk. The following are the most important features of the Documentor:

1. Easy to use
2. You can add regular posts, pages, and inline documentation and everything appears on a single page.
3. Added posts or pages or the inline sections can be reordered.
4. Create documentation for multiple products and use easy embed options to publish any number of knowledge bases.
5. Viewers can give feedback on the sections.

Full Site Knowledge Base:

Looking at the love of our clients, here is a big announcement for everyone. If you are willing to create a full site Knowledge Base, then there is good news for you all. Documentor is coming up with a new plugin by which you can create a full site Knowledge Base. Therefore stay tuned for the updates of the new product to be launched soon.

The main motive when you launch a product is to make people aware about it functionalities and make them understand how it works. You cannot expect your visitors to contact the Support team each time if they are not aware about its working. This might be indeed frustrating for them.

The best way to attain it is through the Product Documentation that will list out its working as well as the common questions that arises on the minds of the people.

Moreover it will also save the time of the visitors as they can access the documentation any where and any time.

Why to opt for a SaaS Based Product for Documentation? 

SaaS (Software as a Service) can be considered as a method of Software delivery where the vendor or the service provider hosts the application remotely and it is made available to the customer over a network.

It is just like the rental that the user have to pay for the period of time they are using it.

As time has passed SaaS based products have gained so much of importance due to the advantages that it offers.

Advantages of SaaS Based Product:

• Upfront Savings
• Saves time
• No server maintenance required
• Easy to upgrade as the Service Provider provides with the upgrades and updates
• Highly adopted as it can be managed anywhere and any time

7 SaaS Based Product Documentation Service:

Kayako:

It allows to create a rich interactive self-service center with video as well as imagery. One can easily create a knowledge base that will help to have a better understanding of the product that is offered.

The articles are categorized based on different categories and sub-categories along with the count that help the visitor to understand it at a quick glance.

Zendesk:

One of the great service provided to create a Documentation or knowledge base for your customers by Zendesk.

It provides to build a beautiful knowledge base, community as well as the customer portal.

All in one service is provided that helps the users to easily manage the knowledge base.

Freshdesk:

It allows to create a SEO rich knowledge base very easily and quickly. One of the unique feature that it offers is that it allows the support team for converting a reply to a customer into a KBase article.

It provides integration with Google Analytics to find out what exactly the customers are looking for. There is different content for staff as well as customers as it provides with different access controls.

Desk.com: 

They provide with a great service to create online documentation or knowledge base for the customers. It is very simple to use just as cutting and pasting the content that you require.

The team can easily update the content whenever required without needing any of the help from the web designer. It also provides with multilingual knowledge base that allows to serve the visitors across the globe.

Help Scout:

It helps to enhance the support with a well integrated knowledge base. It allows to manage the knowledge base of up to 5 sites with no additional charge for it.

One can upload the articles easily in HTML, Markdown or txt format. It is also multi-lingual that helps the visitors about better understanding of the product and its features.

JitBit:

They offer a knowledge base which is very simple that offers to publish any ticket to it with a single click.

The documentation in knowledge base can be distinguished as Public and Private. Private articles are the one to which only the technicians and admins will have the access to open it.

It also provides suggestions for the documents/ articles  for the visitors on the client portal.

HappyFox:

It provides with simple online knowledge base or documentation that is beautiful, searchable, social media ready and responsive for the mobile. HappyFox also provides for the auto suggestion for the users on the client portal. With the structured index it makes it easy to share over the social media.

The above listed are some of the best SaaS based Product Documentation services that helps to create an online documentation for your product very easily and quickly.

One does not require technical knowledge to create such type of documentation.

This is the last thing on the planet anyone would want to do. And that is to read, write and talk about the documentation process of a product. This is one of the last steps of the Project Life Cycle and also the most important one. Having a proper documentation of your product is going to give an ease of understanding to your website visitors. And if they understand everything about your product, they are most likely to buy it.

Therefore, you need to make sure that while you are creating documentation for any product, you need to see that it happens appropriately. That is why, in this blog, I am going to give you a 10 pointer checklist that will help you in creating that perfect documentation for any type of product.

1. Covering the basics

So this is the basic thing while creating the document. You have to mention all the basics of the product. For example, if you are creating a document for a mobile phone, then right from its screen size, to its internal memory and expandable one, you have to give every minute detail of it. This is will help the user understand the intricacies of the product so that he or she can willingly make the purchase.

2. Giving reference links

While creating the document, if you have taken any kind of reference from any website or e-book or from any other source, then you must provide the reference link at the bottom of the document. This is because it is counted as one of the ethical practices while creating the documentation. In simple words, when you are referring to someone on your website, you ought to give reference to that source from where you have taken the data.

3. Clutter-free documentation

This one is really important. You have to make sure that your documentation looks absolutely clean and clutter free. Do not stuff the document with too much of text as the user will not find it interesting to read. Instead, use less text, but be sure that the text which you are using is impact-ful and understanding enough for the visitor who is visiting your website.

4. Use pictures if possible

As the old saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words. So you can use pictures related to your product that will go in sync with the text. Thus, this will minimize the length of the documentation along with its complexities. The audience on the web prefers to go through those documents which comprise of pictures, diagrams, tabular sections, bullet points as it gives a quick reference of what the document is all about instead of reading the whole thing.

5. Humanizing the work

So while you are reading a user manual, how many times have you thought that if there was really a human species on the other side who created this manual? Or was it the wonders of the computer that made this manual? Albeit you are not here to paint or create a colorful novel or manual. Al you can do is, just humanize the content a little bit with your brand’s touch or your personality. This will only make the reader comfortable while reading the document.

6. Predicting problems

It is really important that you are anticipating problems that your users might face while using the document. See if all the call-to-action buttons are working or not. Think from the user’s perspective, what are the things that they will more focus on then act accordingly.

7. Use a standardized document

English is a language that can become flowery, harsh, soft, subtle etc and take many other forms. But then it can also end up in the state of confusion and disagreement while you are creating a document for any product. Therefore, I would suggest you use a standard language throughout the documentation process. What you can do is, you can dedicate a separate section at the beginning of the document mentioning that certain terms will be used in the documents and this is how they should be interpreted. This will avoid the confusion and disagreements among the audience.

8. Make use of rationale statements

If you are making use of rationale statements, then they are going to reduce the ambiguity of your document. Using such statements helps in simplifying your statements and also provides your users with additional information. If you are conveying the requirement in a concise manner then your audience is most likely to understand it.

9. Do the documentation by yourself

Nowadays you get ready-made templates for the documentation process. Documentation is really rewarding if done correctly and it can be of great benefit to your viewers for obvious reasons. So it is always better than you do it all by yourself. As when you are giving someone else to do it, it will not have the inclusion of all the details that you want to be in that document.

10. Keep easy to share options

So when you are creating the documentation for any product you have to keep the sharing options for that document in a proper manner. So that it will be visible to the viewers. If the viewer wants to share it on social media then he or she should be able to do it. Also, you should keep an option of “download PDF” over there, so those who wish to download it can easily find the option and they can download it.

I hope you will find this checklist useful and with this, you can deploy the things that were clinging behind while creating documentation for your product. If you have anything more to add on it, you can mention it in the comments section below and I would be happy to discuss it. Until then, good luck with your documentation process!

Are you planning to create an Internal Knowledge Base for your Company? Are you searching for tools to create a Knowledge Base for your company, products or services? So read further to know more about the Internal Knowledge Base as well as the easiest plugin used to create the documentation for you.

What is an Internal Knowledge Base?

Internal Knowledge Base can be defined as a complete set of information created by the company. The information can be a privacy policy, product details or service details. Therefore, you can save the internal knowledge base on the cloud and make it available to your employees within the intranet.

Importance of Internal Knowledge Base:

As your company grows, there is a lot of information to be shared among the employees. Information such as privacy policies or product details or services provided. So having an internal knowledge base is most important as all the information is available in one place. This makes it easier for the employees to access the data anytime they require.

You can create your documentation manually and make it available to your employees. But it is time-consuming and becomes complicated as the information increases. There are various tools that can help you create documentation. But they seem to be complicated to use. In order to have a good internal knowledge base the software or the plugin should be easy to use.

Documentor

Documentation is the most important asset for any organization. So the easiest way to create documentation or an internal knowledge base is the “Documentor” plugin.  Documentor helps you to easily create guides and arrange them using the drag and drop feature. You must have come across many other documentation plugins. All the guides you create are saved on their server. But this may lead to downtime if their server is responding at a slow pace. Documentor allows you to save your guides on your own server. Documentor loads every section, page or post from the guide on the same page.

Features of Documentor Plugin

Documentor makes your life easier as it is easy to use. All you have to do is download the Documentor plugin and start creating your guides.

1. Drag and Drop Guides:

What if you have created a huge documentation and found that you need to reorder many sections. Performing such action manually becomes a headache. Therefore by using Documentor, you can easily reorder your documentation or guides by simply dragging them.

2. Add Blog Post and Pages to your Document:

There might be a situation where you have already created some post and want to include them in your documentation. You don’t need to write the same content again and again. Documentor allows you to add Blog posts as well as pages to your Knowledge Base.

3. Add Shortcodes to your sections

You might be using several plugins. For example, a form builder, image gallery, etc. You can add their shortcodes in your guides. Therefore, you can add Images, Videos, Image Gallery, Graphs, Maps to your guide by just pasting their shortcodes.

4. Visitors Feedback

Visitors viewing your Knowledge Base can give their feedback about the content or section they are reading. As a result, you can make changes according to it.

5. Multilingual Support:

As Documentor is WPML compatible, it is possible for a viewer to view the document in his language.

6. Save as PDF:

The Documentor Pro allows you to save your internal knowledge base in pdf format. Hence, you can share your internal Knowledge Base within your employees.

7. Print Knowledge Base:

Along with saving, you can also print your internal Knowledge Base using the print icon.

With these features, one can easily create an internal knowledge base using WordPress. As WordPress is a under friendly platform and Documentor allows you to create unlimited guides, you can create and maintain internal knowledge base with ease.

Go ahead and try Documentor.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).