Creating Online Help (Part 2): Strategies and Implementation
Step-By-Step Strategy for Constructing a Help System
The following steps run through the basic procedure you should follow when creating a solid, useful Help system for your users:
- Determine the objective of your Help system.
- Collect any data you intend to import into your Help system.
- Consider additional information that complies with your objective that you intend to include in your Help system.
- Identify your information sources for new topic content, including subject matter experts.
- Determine the style standard that you intend to use for your Help system.
Determine the types of elements you intend to use in your Help system, including:
- Begin your project and create an outline topic that determines how you intend to organize your table of contents. Incorporate outside information you want to import into the design of your outline.
- Design custom folders that appear like the books you want to create for your Help.
- Import into your custom folders any outside files that have already been constructed.
- Autocreate your TOC and then use your outline to construct new topics in the Table of Contents Composer and organize the placement of your imported topic files.
- Create or identify the style sheet you intend to attach to your topics.
- Highlight your topics in the Topic tab and link your style sheet to the topics.
- Remove from your imported topics any unwanted embedded or inline styles.
- Open the topics you created in the WYSIWYG editor and begin developing their content. Remember to spell-check your content.
- Selectively and carefully incorporate embedded and inline styles only where necessary.
- Selectively and judiciously incorporate hyperlinks only when necessary.
- Insert images and multimedia into your topics where needed.
- Include image map hotspots to your images where preferred.
- Determine whether you want to layer your information in your topics through the use of pop-up windows with information, or drop-down text. Apply these elements to your topics during development.
- Construct any desired template for your Help system based on information in your Header and Footer fields. Apply this template to your preferred topics.
- Construct your glossary, if desired.
- Apply glossary-expanding definitions to topics if desired.
- Construct your index with its index entries.
- Before you get too far ahead, present a design prototype to the person approving your work to determine whether you are headed in the right direction. If not, alter your development accordingly.
- Construct custom Help windows if your Help is context-sensitive. Design the size and placement of your windows so that they complement the application they serve.
- Create a map file with map IDs if your Help is context-sensitive. Test your Help system's custom windows and map IDs with the CSH Test Tool.
- Create and incorporate Related Topic, See Also, and Keyword Link controls to improve navigation.
- Apply conditional build tags to text and topics to differentiate between the output of your Help system and printed documentation.
- Generate your WebHelp using a build expression to remove content from your WebHelp that is relevant to your printed documentation only.
- Generate the printed documentation using a build expression to remove content from your printed documentation that is relevant to your Help only.
In this article, you've learned how to create windows and navigation in your Help system, and customize it to make a professional and easy-to-use Help system.
