Building Knowledge Base

You can use ClickHelp to create an online knowledge base. Here is how you can do it:

• Define your target audience - whether your knowledge base should be internal or external. If your knowledge base is internal, then the Restricted Access options are the first to look at. Here are articles on how to use Restricted Access options:
  • Understanding Roles and Permissions
  • Restricted User Manuals
• If your knowledge base is external, you will want the search engines to index it. This will happen automatically - web crawlers will occasionally index your public KB. However, if you'd like to have better control over this process, consider using the SEO integrations and features offered by ClickHelp:
  
  • Google Analytics
    
  • Webmaster Tools
    
  • Documentation Portal Sitemap
    
  • Robots.txt
    

• If there is more than one audience you're creating your KB for, you can reuse content from the same project and create KBs for different audiences. You can add output tags, snippets, variables to make your content more relevant to every audience. Here are the articles that will be helpful:

  • Reusing Topic in Multiple ToC Nodes

  • Conditional Content
    

  • Content Snippets
    

  • Variables
    

  • Output Tags
    

• Decide whether you want the knowledge base to be structured or just be a set of help topics with search as the main navigation tool. If you decide to create an unstructured knowledge base, you can hide the Table of Contents in the settings of your Reader UI Template on the "Tools | Portal Settings | Branding | Reader Interface" screen.

• When you're done with content creation, you can publish the newly created topic immediately. You don't have to wait until all the topics are ready. Use the partial update publishing mode to publish topics one by one as soon as they are ready.

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