Many businesses and organizations underestimate the value of a dedicated knowledge base website. Utilizing a generic Wordpress template or wiki may seem like a quick fix, but it often results in a lackluster learning or onboarding experience. These templates are not typically structured to guide users in the direction they need to go, nor do they adequately accommodate existing users searching for reference information. In this post, we will explore how to create a highly effective knowledge base website using custom HTML/CSS and the expertise of ChatGPT.
Raytha is an open source .NET cms that makes it super easy to build custom websites, like a knowledge base.
Knowledge Base Structure
To ensure that our knowledge base website is user-friendly and easy to navigate, we will be including several key components. These will include a home page, articles, user guides, and general pages. Additionally, articles will be organized into specific user guides, each with a predetermined order that visitors should follow for optimal learning. By structuring our content in this way, we aim to provide our audience with a seamless and intuitive learning experience.
Home Page
To create a visually appealing and user-friendly home page for our knowledge base website, we enlisted the help of ChatGPT to provide us with HTML code. The resulting page design features a top navigation menu for easy site navigation, as well as a banner area complete with a search bar to help visitors quickly find the information they need. The page also includes a section dedicated to user guides, as well as FAQ articles, and a "get-in-touch" section located at the bottom of the page. With these features in place, our knowledge base website is poised to provide visitors with a comprehensive and user-friendly learning experience.
We went ahead and put the home page HTML into the home page template in our Raytha platform's admin portal.
User Guides
The User Guides list view contains an SVG icon, title, and brief description of the user guide, with a link that points to the detail view.
The detail view contains a Vimeo embed, description, etc.
Articles
The articles views are pretty self explanatory - list of articles, with a search bar to the right, filter by category, and open an article to view it.
Total level of effort building this into Raytha: ~2 hours.
Not bad for just 2 hours of effort. I would suggest maybe another 24 to 36 hours of developer labor to bring it up to a professional level.
If you are interested in seeing a demo of how this works, or how Raytha works in general, please reach out to [email protected].
ENTREPRENEUR & SOFTWARE ENGINEER, AUSTIN, TX I enjoy tackling a wide array of business challenges ranging from front line product support and operations to sales and marketing efforts. My core expertise is in software development building enterprise level web applications.
