How to Create a Web Help System

About Web Help

Web Help (or browser-based Help) is an online help system that can be uploaded to your web server or put into a shared directory of your local area network, so other people can access it using a regular browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari, etc. Thus, an Online Help system is actually a series of HTML files containing help topics from your help project. Of course, it should also include the TOC and the alphabetical index to provide easy navigation for the end user.

A Web Help system can be used as an alternative to or together with HTML Help. While HTML Help in the CHM format is mainly used as a local help system for a desktop application in the Windows environment, an online help system is available to your users on the product's web page. This will help you reduce time and efforts spent on customer service because you can simply direct your users to a web page with the troubleshooting section that is located on your web server. Moreover, a Web Help system is probably the only document that contains lots of keywords relevant to your product, which can help you receive more target traffic from major search engines as well. That is the reason why many software vendors from Micro-ISVs to larger companies do create and publish an online help system on their websites.

Web Help is a Must-Have Format for Web-Based Software

Nowadays, more and more application are developed as web-based software rather than as desktop applications. There are quite a lot of different Internet services that we use every day and most of those popular websites do provide online help systems to their users. And it is really great when an average user who has a problem can solve their problem promptly without contacting technical support and waiting too long for the response. Moreover, as it was mentioned above, having a Web Help system on your website, you can simply give customers who need technical support a link to the corresponding topic in the online help system.

So if you are working on web-based software, creating a Web Help system is probably your only choice. Now, let's see how HelpSmith can help you in preparing all the required files of such a help system the way that you do not have to manually a big number of HTML pages, but can concentrate on writing topics.

Reuse the Content from Your Help Project

There is NO reason why you cannot reuse help topics and other information from your desktop application's help project and create the Web Help files directly from it. HelpSmith allows you to automatically create Web Help by exporting help topics, the table of contents and the keyword index from your project. To do so, select "Project\Create Web Help" from the menu or click the corresponding button on the toolbar (which is similarly to when you export your help project into other help formats) and HelpSmith will prepare all the required files.

All you have to do is just upload all the files of your Web Help system to your Internet web server or simply copy them to a shared folder if you want other people in your corporate network to access it.

HelpSmith provides you with the ability to modify the default Web Help layout by applying custom fonts, colors, text labels, and other settings according to your own needs.

What About other Help Formats?

Thus, you can dramatically simplify the process of supplying technical documentation in multiple formats: HTML Help, Web Help, Printed Manuals and all that is from the same source project.

Being a complete solution, HelpSmith allows you to create a Web Help system by writing help topics from scratch in a full-featured word processor, by exporting your existing projects into the Web Help format, or by importing topics from MS Word documents (RTF), HTML, or plain text files that can be written in different ANSI and Unicode encodings.

Eugene Ivanov is a programmer and a technical writing blogger at www.helpsmith.com, a company developing documentation tools for software developers and help writers.

Article Source: http://www.howto365.com

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