What is this?
This project is a Gatsby Starter for a free self-hosted help center. You don't need to know how to code in order to set it up, and you can host it for free on any static site hosting service.
The goal of this project is to enable anyone to set up a free help center for their product. Help Centers are websites which contain documentation, ansers to frequent questions and tips for your product or service. Having a help center reduces the number of support tickets you’ll receive. You don’t even need to know how to code to set it up. This help center comes with tons of documentation guiding you through the setup and continued use.
A Help Center?
This project allows you to set up a help center for your product. The users of your product can visit the help center to find answers to recurring problems, to learn about advanced features, or even the latest changes. The content is completely up to you.
Typically having a help center greatly reduces the number of support requests you’ll get, as your users will find answers to the most common questions in your help center.
Think of a help center as a hybrid of FAQs, pro-tips for power users and a changelog.
What is this exactly?
I needed a help center for a project I’m working on, but I wasn’t happy with the existing solutions. Most of them were paid SaaS-products, which offered way more features than I needed and had a hefty price tag. Instead, I set out to create a help center myself. I later converted it into a Gatsby Starter called gatsby-starter-help-center and open-sourced it.
You can use gatsby-starter-help-center to build your own help center. The remaining documentation shows you how to set it up, edit your content and how to host it for free.
How to use this project?
You’ll need to create a new Gatsby Starter based on gatsby-starter-help-center. Then you’ll fill the starter with your own content by creating and editing Markdown files. The collections are managed through a YAML file. Finally you’ll need to host the generated static site. There are free solutions like Netlify for this.
The full setup instructions are written down in ”Setup“.
What does the help center look like?
The page you’re looking at right now is built with gatsby-starter-help-center, so it should give you a good impression of what you’ll get. The colors, style and icons are fully customizable.
Acknowledgements
This project is heavily inspired by Intercom’s help center. The idea of organizing the content into collections, sections and articles was taken from there, as well as the idea for the overall design.