Knowledge Base
How to plan, create and deploy a knowledge base website.
Plan
For self-service support to benefit customers it must be relevant to them i.e. the information is tailored to their needs and easily available across all platforms, mobile and web. Planning the navigation and knowledge base content to meet the needs of your customers is the first step in the process.
Create
Writing content which is informative and easily understood is hard. Readability and context are key to providing effective self service customer support via a knowledge base. Follow best practice and continually develop the scope of the knowledge base and tune content to match customer requests.
Deploy
YouDoCMS includes a free knowledge base template to demonstrate the ease of use and speed of our knowledge base builder. Our static site builder generates pages locally for preview and then builds with a custom domain for a single click deployment to the cloud in seconds.
Why build a knowledge base?
Extensive research from respected industry sources such as Gartner and Forrester has shown that the majority of customers prefer self service support options to find answers. A knowledge base provides an opportunity to listen to what your customers have to say and improve customer service using that feedback.
YouDoCMS is an application for building small business knowledge base websites. An alternative to the most popular hosted solutions such as WordPress with Better Docs or KnowAll plugin or Joomla with the Help Desk extension.
Sites built with YouDoCMS load twice as fast as a hosted knowledge base. Analysis of CMS performance for the 2022 edition the Web Almanac show WordPress and Joomla barely achieving a 40% core web vitals score. Knowledge base sites developed with YouDoCMS can achieve 100% and on mobile speed matters.
Example Site
Domains and Themes
YouDoCMS supports multiple domains/sites and bootstrap themes
Creating a knowledge is not a simple task and attempting to create a large knowledge base from scratch is difficult. The most effective solution is to start small using existing resources to create a foundation for your knowledge base. As an online repository of customer support documentation, product information, tutorials and guides a knowledge base should be flexible enough to grow and meet the needs of the business and its customers.
YouDoCMS facilitates this process by importing information already available from Joomla! or WordPress and supports multiple domains and sites. For example consider the case where you have requirements for internal knowledge base which also contains information useful for customer support. YouDoCMS enables sharing across domains so that selected internal information can be made available on a public site.
Example knowledge base themes are included in the default installation to demonstrate the ease of use of our documentation builder. Our static site builder generates pages locally for preview and then builds for your hosted domain for a single click deployment to the cloud in seconds.
- Migrate knowledge base from Joomla! or WordPress.
- Multiple sites and themes.
- Shared content.
- Site Backup included.
Knowledge Base Template
YouDoCMS includes a pre-defined knowledge base boiler plate template includes 9 top level categories 13 pre-defined sub-categories and 55 articles.
Each category includes a description of the content to be covered. For example if you are including a "getting started" section in your knowledge base this should include additional information and examples for the user to understand the background the topic to which the section applies.
All articles are allocated to a specific category and include a template to be used as a writing guide to ensure your content is tailored to the relevant topic. For example the typical elements of a "getting started" article are an introduction, explanation of knowledge requirement, examples to assist the reader to understand the topic and a link to further reading examples.
A knowledge base is only as good as the content it contains. Uniquely YouDoCMS includes readability analysis using the Flesch reading score methodology. This analyses the length of paragraphs and sentences to improve the reading ease of your documents making your knowledge base as user-friendly as possible.
- Same HTML editor as Joomla and WordPress.
- Flesch Reading Score.
- Key phrase Analysis.
- Knowledge base article templates.
Navigation and Search
YouDoCMS knowledge-base template includes 72 prebuilt menus including anchor URLs to navigate within each HTML page.
The YouDoCMS navigation model builds an individual HTML for each category within the knowledge base and any subcategories. Each category page incorporates all articles within the category with a menu and anchor URLs to swiftly scroll to any point in the page. The menu includes links to each of the other categories allowing the user to navigate through the knowledge base without using the back button. This minimises the number of pages loaded which improves the usability of the knowledge base.
YouDoCMS includes search engine optimisation for your knowledge base. JSON-LD is the preferred format of search engine data for Google and YouDoCMS generates Schema.org format meta data each time the site is built.
- 72 pre-defined menus.
- Anchor URL inline navigation.
- Full text search.
- JSON-LD search metadata.
Frequently Asked Questions
YouDoCMS supports multiple sets of frequently asked questions and tutorials.
For example category specific FAQs could appear in both the user manual and the product manual sections. In addition a typical FAQs section can be created to include the most popular questions from both the user and product manuals. Typically this would be available as a category on the home page of the knowledge base.
Similarly tutorials can be created specific to topics or categories and included as a tutorial within that section. YouDoCMS supports the cross-referencing of content to multiple categories. Therefore a tutorial section on the home page can incorporate the most popular tutorials from multiple sources i.e. user or products manuals.
- FAQ template.
- Multiple categories.
- Key phrase Analysis.
- Source code editor.
Low Cost Knowledge Base
YouDoCMS integrates with Azure, Cloudflare, AWS, GitHub and Google Firebase. Each of these cloud providers offer a generous free tier for hosting a knowledge base.
YouDoCMS is a desktop application and unlike hosted alternatives does not include any fees for hosting or additional users. This makes YouDoCMS the ideal low-cost knowledge base solution for small business.
YouDoCMS integrates with node.js for single click install of each cloud API. A single domain can use any supported cloud so you can test which platform is best for your project.
- Free Bootstrap themes including widgets.
- Free hosting with AWS, Cloudflare, Google, GitHub Pages and Azure.
- Single click build and deploy to cloud.
- Custom Domain CNAME setup.
Frequently Asked Questions
Choosing a knowledge base can be confusing please see our knowledgebase demonstration.
Static sites are suitable for the most common website types which is blogs corporate portfolio landing pages and directories. YouDoCMS static sites include search but if you require forms or e-commerce then a hosted solution is currently the best option.
YouDoCMS integrates with the Algolia search engine. Algolia has a free plan so site search can be incorporated into any static site.
Yes it is. All of the cloud hosting providers offer a free tier which is suitable for the majority of low traffic websites. See our guide to static site web hosting to compare the features and benefits of five major cloud platforms.
YouDoCMS is a desktop application which pre-renders your pages before uploading to the cloud. Therefore the static sites built with YouDoCMS are 100% secure and cannot be hacked.