Writing documents is not enough for correct authoring. To shape your content and make it usable, you need a proper documentation tool. The result will be a highly readable, comprehensible documentation portal that will satisfy both your users and your employees.
Make Your Text a Document
Certainly, the core of the document is the content, telling the reader how to use the product or how it works. But there are some requirements necessary to make these texts into documents that are easy to read and inquire about.
1. Unified text style
There are requirements for any given type of documentation, so all the writers involved in the project should be using the same terminology, stick to the official vocabulary, and make their texts look unified as if written by the same person. This is the editor’s job.
2. Illustrations
They may include various types of media: simple pictures, GIF animation, videos, or audio, as well as a combination of these types. All of them should illustrate the usage of the product at various stages, potential results of its application, or its error messages.
3. Hyperlinks
Not only should they provide fast access to related topics within the body of documentation. They also can lead to external resources that give sufficient information on the matter or just can’t be copied because of copyright issues. It starts with the table of contents and included hyperlinks on all the pages that require them.
4. Design
First, the documents should be readable and easy to understand, with texts and illustrations fitting each other, and hyperlinks leading where they should. Second, the documentation portal is better designed in the corporate style, with related color schemes, layouts, corporate logo, and even recognizable fonts.
Tools for Forming Documentation Online
Given these requirements, you need to find proper tools for creating your documentation portal. They should allow for checking texts and formatting pages, embedding media, and applying color schemes. These specialized tools are optimized for creating documents from scratch, at the same time allowing to import documentation from files or other platforms.
Among tools that could be useful for creating complete documentation portals, there are data reuse, collaboration-oriented tools, as well as reader UI tweaker, and support of interactive elements (quizzes, surveys, live chats, and chatbots). Along with the variety of templates provided by the platform, forming documentation from drafts becomes a simple task when managed right.
