Help Centre: Writing Effective Articles - Tips & Tricks

A few tips to bear in mind when writing articles:

• Draft the article into the correct Section. It may be easier to initially open up the section you'd like to write an article (e.g. I clicked on ZenDesk Workflow for this article and then clicked Add Content > Article). This automatically sets the 'Show in Section' area so that articles are stored in the correct place.

• Word the article title so that it is easy to understand (e.g. 'How do I install Timelog?', 'Publishing the Scan Factory Client', etc). Be sure to format these titles appropriately - questions should be formatted like "How do I complete this thing?" whereas statements should be formatted like "Writing Effective Articles - Tips & Tricks". This also ties in with the next point:
• Word the article body so that it is clear from an end-user's perspective; therefore asking (or answering) a question in the article title and wording the body of the article using terminology an end-user would understand is important. It's easy to forget this and slip into developer mode - just remember, Keep It Simple!

• Labels, labels, labels! Fill this area out with as many labels as possible (try to avoid confusing these with the 'tags' we use in tickets - they work differently). That way, no matter how a user searches, as long as they hit the relevant keywords, your articles will be ranked in order of the most relevant. For example, if you were writing an article about Voicemail, you could use all of the following labels (at least):

• If using screenshots, try to keep them trimmed down and relevant. Using many large screenshots is overwhelming to read through and makes it hard to spot any instructional text you may have written around them.