Somebody has asked you to build a help center and you're not sure what the first move is. The instinct is to start writing articles, and that's the step that goes wrong most often, because you end up with 40 articles that overlap, contradict each other and use 3 names for the same button.
Here's the order that works. The first step costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
Find out what people actually ask
Before you decide anything, find out what your customers and your colleagues keep asking. Your support inbox, your team's chat, the questions people ask in demos. This is the step everybody skips, and it's the reason help centers end up documenting the product instead of answering the questions.
Decide the shape before you write
How many articles a topic needs, where one ends and the next begins, and what your categories are called. Getting this wrong is expensive later, because moving an article after people have linked to it costs you more than writing it did.
Decide what things are called
One name for each thing, written down, before anyone writes an article. If you skip this you'll have 3 names for the same feature by article 20, and your search will split between them.
Write the articles
Now you can write, and now it's the easy part, because the hard decisions are already made.
Keep it consistent if more than one person writes
The moment a second person writes an article, you need rules that aren't in your head.
Make sure an AI can answer from it
If any part of the reason you're building this is a support bot, or customers asking assistants about your product, this is the step that makes the difference.
You don't need all of it, and you don't need it in one go. Steps 1 and 2 are the ones that save the most work later. If you only do one thing today, do step 1. It's free and it takes an afternoon. The thinking behind steps 1 to 3 is taught in the courses How a help center actually works and Deciding what goes where.
Start with step 1, it's free →