Why I use ClickHelp
In my post called ‘FAQ on Technical Writing’ I answered some popular questions and I mentioned that I use ClickHelp for writing documentation. ClickHelp is a modern browser-based documentation tool to create online user manuals, as well as printed documents in various formats.
Now, I want to tell you why I use it and why you should pay attention to this tool.
Disclaimer: I’ve created a project from a template to provide screenshots to my post.
Agile Technical Writing
Sometimes a product release can lead to few changes but they can be important so you can’t ignore them and not update your documentation. With ClickHelp you don’t need to republish the whole documentation, you can choose specific topics that were changed. Here is how it works.
Click the stacked papers icon, then choose Select Topics to Publish… option.
Select topic(s) and click Publish Selected.
Proceed with the publishing steps.
That’s all, your topics have been updated.
You don’t have to wait for other team members to finish their help topics to update the documentation. Now, if technical writers finish working on a topic, they can independently publish it which makes the writing process more productive and effective — no one will be a bottleneck.
Productive Writing and Reviewing
Writing documentation in ClickHelp feels so good because of many reasons. First of all, you don’t need to learn the UI, you already have all the necessary skills because ClickHelp supports WYSIWYG editor in a way the popular word processors do. You get the functions you are used to:
- Text formatting
- Font size and style changes
- Inserting images and tables
- Inserting links to other documents in an easy way
- Creating bulleted and numbered lists
- And much more
Here is how it looks inside:
It also supports an editor HTML, CSS, and JavaScript content. It has many features that assist you with content creation:
- HTML tags completion
- Intellisense
- Real-time syntax validation
- Descriptions for hundreds of CSS attributes
- JavaScript statements descriptions
Here is the code editor:
And even if you don’t have the knowledge of a programming/markup language, don’t be afraid, the ClickHelp team created effective documentation that will provide you with all necessary steps on creating readable and beautiful documentation.
However, it’s better to have some basic programming skills. In my previous posts, I described why you should learn it and what you can do if you never used a coding language:
Speaking of reviewing, ClickHelp has everything to help you save time. There is no need to send your documentation via email. In your ClickHelp portal, save the changes and assign a topic to a reviewer. If you’ve written a number of topics, you can set an assignee for multiple topics using one button.
A reviewer will get a notification with a login and password so they will have access to the topics in the portal. When a reviewer leaves a comment or a TODO item, you will get a notification, as well. Then they also can assign topics to you for improvements. As a result, nothing will fall through the cracks because all team members work in one portal, and ClickHelp gives you a ready-to-use working process.
SEO Improvements for your Documentation
If you’re interested in SEO, ClickHelp is what you need. ClickHelp supports the Webmaster Tools integration that grants you control over your documentation portal indexing, allows sitemaps submitting, gives you the access to various stats regarding your search ranks, etc. You can submit your portal link to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster, and make your documentation visible for many people. Moreover, you can specify your Meta Description and Meta Keywords which also improve SEO. More details are here.
Conclusion
ClickHelp has more great features but here I’ve wanted to talk about the ones which helped me in my technical writing. If you want to see all the advantages yourself, order a free trial and get an online documentation portal right now (no credit card required).