User Manuals
Create and publish product and user manuals
User Manual Theme
Publish a user manual free to the cloud with one of 3 bootstrap documentation themes. Each theme includes menus, search and content sections, one html page per section of the user manual with links to each article in the section.
User Manual Template
The free user manual template comprises 6 sections and can be easily adapted to most products or services. This includes FAQ's, onboarding, user guide, maintenance, warranty, repair, troubleshooting and a glossary.
Full Text Search
Fast full text search using Lunr.js for instant results. The search index is rebuilt automatically each time you build and deploy to the cloud.
Still using MS Word or PDF's?
There is more to creating an online user manual than save as HTML.
Moving your user manuals and product information online creates opportunities for improving the experience of your customers and enhancing your relationship with them. Research shows that customers prefer self-service platforms to find answers to problems as fast as possible. Off-line user manuals are useful for reference and archive purposes however these cannot provide customer feedback. An online user manual provides the opportunity to use analytics to monitor which user manual topics are referred to most often and highlight potential problems with your product or service.
YouDoCMS Include a free user manual template, a free bootstrap theme and the tools to build and publish SEO optimised user manuals and deploy to the cloud or distribute as static HTML zipped archives.
Example Site
Onboarding Guide
Depending on your product or service the onboarding guide may also be known as an operating or instruction manual. The onboarding template comprises 7 sections from installation, getting started, example use cases, customisation, reporting, help and further support. To adapt this template for your user manual simply rename the articles, categories and menus to suit your product or service. Add text and images and build the manual to your local machine as a draft copy before publishing to the cloud..
- Onboarding category summary.
- 7 example sections including menus.
User Guide
YouDoCMS includes an example user guide which covers the purpose of a product or service, intended use and scope, functional description, dependencies, legal requirements and the technical specification. A user guide should answer the "how can the user complete a task and what do they need to do it" question. This should also include information about what happens if a task is done incorrectly. If a product is used by different types of users for example end-user, installer or administrator include tags to designate which type of user this article applies to.
- User guide template with menus, categories and tags.
- 6 Example sections.
FAQ's
The frequently asked question section is arguably the most important section of an online user manual. This is a curated list of the most popular questions and answers and should be the easiest and quickest section to find within the user manual. It may seem obvious but the most common question should be the first one in the list. YouDoCMS provides web log analytics to monitor which FAQ's are accessed frequently simplifying the process of identifying priority information or unresolved issues.
- Single click duplication of FAQ to speed up editing.
- Auto-creation of URL's with permalink settings.
User Manual Options?
We make creating your user manual site quick and easy.
Menus
Website navigation is either browsing via a menu system or search. Create meaningful titles for menus to aid users in finding information.
Categories
Use categories to group information with a similar purpose. Use descriptive titles or categories and content do not assume the user is familiar with jargon..
Images and media
YouDoCMS themes include lightbox functionality and a media manager to create thumbnails of images. Where applicable use a thumbnail image to speed up page loading with a link to display the full size version in the browser.
Search
YouDoCMS includes full text search by default and the search index is rebuilt every time the site is deployed to the cloud. Search options include Lunr.js or Algolia.
Here are 3 working steps to create your first online user manual.
Duplicate Example
Duplicate the example site and configure the cloud of your choice. See CDN integration.
Edit content
Rename categories, menus, and articles. Add content and images, update SEO metadata and check the Flesch reading score.
Apply Template
Allocate the theme to the user manual and preview a page in the browser while writing content. Alternatively build a draft version of the site to localhost for review and approval. Finally build to your custom domain and deploy to the cloud.
How It Works?
YouDoCMS is a desktop content management system to build and deploy static HTML sites with any HTML theme.
To create online user manuals versus hardcopy or PDFs derived from Microsoft Word you need to write content, create images, create navigation, update HTML, create search indexes and lastly include search meta data. After you have created the manual you need to configure a host to serve the pages and upload content.
YouDoCMS includes all of the functionality to create build and deploy an online user manual. Furthermore when updates are required updated URLs are automatically redirected with a 301 status to ensure your navigation is not broken.
Static CMS