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Why You Need Web Help on your Website Web Help (also known as Website Help) is a help system that can be published on your web server or put into a shared folder of your local area network, so other people can access it via a browser program like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Thus, a Web Help system is actually a set of HTML files containing help topics from your help project. Of course, it should also include the table of contents and the keyword 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 format. While HTML Help in the CHM format is mainly used as a local help system for a desktop Windows application, a Web Help system is available to your users on the product's web page. This will help you reduce time and efforts spent on customer technical support because you can simply direct your users to a web page with the resolution section that is located on your Internet website. Moreover, a Web Help system is probably the only document that contains lots product-related keywords, which can help you get more target traffic from Google and other search engines as well. That is the reason why many software developers from Micro-ISVs to larger companies do create and publish a Web Help system on their websites. Web Help is a must-have format for web applications Today, more and more applications are created as web-based software rather than as regular 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 visitors. And it is really great when an average user who gets in trouble can quickly solve their problem without contacting technical support and waiting too long for the reply. 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, the Web Help format must be 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 write a large amount of HTML files, but can concentrate on writing help topics. Reuse the Content from Your Help Project You can reuse help topics and other information from your existing help project and create a Web Help system 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 help project: simply click the "Create Web Help" command on the "Project" menu or click the corresponding button on the toolbar (similarly to when you export your help project into other help formats) and HelpSmith will prepare all the necessary files. Then you should put 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. With HelpSmith, you can also modify the default Web Help layout by using custom text labels, fonts, colors according to your own needs. How to Provide Help in Multiple Help Formats Thus, you can dramatically simplify the process of supplying Help in multiple help formats: create Web Help, CHM HTML Help, Printed Manuals and all that is from the same source help project. Being a complete help authoring tool, HelpSmith allows you to create a Web Help system by writing help topics from scratch in a full-featured text editor, by exporting your existing help projects into the Web Help format, or by importing help topics from Microsoft Word RTF documents, HTML files, or plain text files that can be written in different Unicode and ANSI encodings.
Article Source: http://www.writerdatabase.com
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.
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