HelpSite.io is the easiest way to make a Knowledge Base or Support Center for your customers that's beautiful, mobile-friendly, and searchable so your customers can find answers fast. Our FAQ sites are responsive, easy to customize, looks good out of the box, and even supports custom domains on our Free plan.
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Some of your most valuable content lives in your support site, yet tools like this require use of a subdomain. What does everyone think about this from an SEO perspective (vs sub directory of root domain)?
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@gerbz I would also like to know about seo impact on having the content on sub domain.
@gerbz@siva7891 The difference should really be negligible in terms of SEO. It's an extremely common practice these days to have differnet subdomains for different parts of your app, and Google is smart enough to just recognize this. Matt Cutts talks about this a bit:
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@richardlovesfaq Thanks for taking time to reply with facts. Good luck with your Startup!!!
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I like the concept of this. How does it differ from something like Zendesk or even someone using a simple helpdesk WordPress theme + shared hosting (without any limit on article numbers)?
Kudos for the development though - what's the stack you use?
@epicplugins Compared to Zendesk, we have a generous free plan, our paid plans are much cheaper ($15/mo compared to $125/mo for 5 users), and we focus exclusively on docs rather than having it be an add-on. Overall I just also think we do some things like search & admin UI better, and we allow for a private KB.
@duellsy@elevioapp superb. Chris, here's the challenge we have right now. We've got some articles in elev.io on this https://icons8.com/app : http://take.ms/T0v9o
How can we set a link to these marked articles? It should be something like a page with fouur articles or four links or something.
Hey PH,
Founder here! I started HelpSite.io because I was tired of choosing between always reinventing the wheel when it came to building out a support center website manually, or having to use a bulky tool like Zendesk that focuses on a million different features, when all I care about is the hosted knowledge base software.
A few nice things:
- Really fast search, powered by @algolia
- An intelligent contact form that auto-suggests articles
- A generous free plan which even supports custom domains (via CNAME).
I'd love to hear feedback and would be happy to answer any questions!
@richardlovesfaq@algolia Hey, this is really awesome. I've invested a lot of time on our help desk, and had a couple of questions/feature requests:
* Are you planning to add e-mail validation to the contact form? A lot of people mis-type their e-mail on ours and we can't contact them (something like a domain validator, plus a message that says to look for a confirmation e-mail to the user). I'm sure the customer could build it themselves, but it's pretty much a universal problem so may be easier for you guys to do once, and do right.
* Do you have voting buttons? These help us know if we should work on an article
* Can you have the option to host on a subdirectory or subdomain? Some people prefer subdirectory for SEO (zendesk has /hc by default)
* Also pricing is pretty great. Out of curiosity, why did you decide to charge on the number of articles instead of traffic?
* I think an iOS SDK that renders the content in the app/has instant search and even caches would be really helpful.
Great job and keep up the great work! It looks awesome!
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@richardlovesfaq How well does this play with chat options, and support tiering. Like the site! A previous company I was at struggled with this, so I foresee a lot of people benefitting from it!
@rahulda1 Thanks!
Email validator -- great idea. Hadn't thought of this yet but it makes perfect sense in our quest to have the world's best contact form.
Voting buttons -- definitely planned, along with analytics/stats of articles.
Subdirectory -- not likely since mixing content with other content on the same domain, while possible using iframes or javascript, can actually harm SEO. We *do* support you using your own subdomain though (e.g. help.yourdomain.com)
Pricing -- articles just seemed like a natural fit for putting a limit on the free plan. Simple projects that have no budget likely don't have as big of a need for tons of articles. Traffic seems too scary / hard to trust / issues around if you count bots, etc.
iOS -- great idea. One day :)
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@richardlovesfaq@algolia Thanks. We just wanted to add a FAQ to our website and now we have a very simple, good looking one and team members can work simultaneously. *thumbsup*
@hellosmoore Since we allow you to use custom HTML, you can easily drop in any chat widget tool (olark, zopim, livechat, etc)
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Richard, I have used so many authoring tools and this looks to me just another in the kit. Whether it is ProProfs (it was HelpIQ earlier), BeegIT, elev.IO, readme.io (as you mentioned in a comment), or it is Zendesk (huge market captured), Freshdesk, UserVoice, or GrooveHQ, HelpSite looks good where startups need to publish a basic KB when they launch but I do not see that the key concerns of technical communicators are addressed here.
For a quick summary of authoring tools for startups, you can refer to my post: http://idratherbewriting.com/201...
For any startup, content should be strategic and is part is the longer marketing strategy. So, content reuse, publishing flexibility, and adaptive reference for contextual use by different teams are the key parameters. Once startups gain traction, they have to port their content from such 'static content site generators' to more advanced platforms which is an expensive proposition. My concerns are:
- Can I create a taxonomy to tag my content for relevant reference?
- Can I reuse a content chunk (a paragraph) across different articles? Consider a scenario where a content marketer is planning literature for an event, or a product sheet, or a drip campaign, and they need to refer to some content from this KB. Once content grows, 'absence of content reuse' often brings inconsistency and chaos in the content processes.
@vingar Re taxonomy: we have both categories & keywords per articles. We plan on allowing a tree-like structure of subcategories. Re chunks - nope. To be honest, reusing content across different mediums (drip campaigns, product sheets, etc). is extremely far outside the scope of what we're trying to do here. There will always be tools that do _more_ things. We're trying to be the tool that does the fewest things that people really need for FAQs, really well.
Great product, and very clean! I will definitely give it a try, but it would be great if you guys could provide "Custom HTML/CSS" in the free plan as well.
@aparkhills It would be nice if everything were always free... but then how would we make money? :) I'd be interested to know if there are any features (whether we have them already or not) that you would be willing to pay for?
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wow, this is a nice little tool and incredibly smooth and fast - was playing with your own help section! nice work and nice first release
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