How to start a Knowledge Base in 5 simple steps

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years you’ll know that a Knowledge Base is becoming more and more common to centralise your business knowledge. The benefits of a Knowledge Base are huge including reducing your average support time significantly as customers have all the answers they need 24/7/365. PaceKB has been making huge advancements in the Knowledge Base industry to make this process even easier, and in this post we will be explaining how you can get started in just five steps.

Sign Up to PaceKB

Signing up to PaceKB is easy, and you can get started with or without a custom domain.

1. To begin, head to our Sign Up page: https://www.pacekb.com/sign-up
2. Next, enter the information required to create a free account
3. Once your account has been created you’ll be prompted to enter your Site Name and domain that you want to use on your Knowledge Base. Enter this information and proceed to creating the Knowledge Base.

You should now be setup and ready to go with your account and Knowledge Base, next you can proceed to customising the website to meet your existing branding

Customise to meet your brand

It’s important for brand continuity to closely match the design of your Knowledge Base with the design of your website and other used software. PaceKB makes it painless to customise your website in every way. Here are just some of the options you have when customising your Knowledge Base

• Site Name
• Site Logo
• Site Favicon
• Site Colour
• Site Description (For SEO Purposes)
• Terms and Conditions Text/URL
• Privacy Policy Text/URL
• Navigation Items
• Timezone
• Date Formats
• Time Formats
• User Display Formats
• Should Excerpts show?
• Should Article Tags show?
• How categories should sort
• How articles should sort
• Should the site be visible on Search Engines?

If you’re a more advanced user taking advantage of our Plus plan you even have the option to customise your website with CSS. This opens a whole new world of possibilities. Up until this step we already have a great looking Knowledge Base, but it could be better.

Create Categories to categorise information

Categories are a great primary organisation method, and can help customers quickly navigate to where they need to go. You can create categories simply by heading to the Categories page in your PaceKB Dashboard, click “+ Add new” and you’ll be able to enter the following information:

1. Name: The name visible on the page
2. Slug: The URL friendly extension of how the category will look in URLs
3. Category Order Priority: If you have your category sorting set to priority the lower the number equals the higher your category will show
4. Parent Category: Is this a sub-category? If so set the parent here
5. Description: This will be shown on the Category page if you want to provide information as to what goes in here
6. Category Thumbnail: If you want an image to be shown on the category you can upload it here

We’ve gone ahead and created our categories and now this is how our Knowledge Base looks!

Create clean and easy-to-read articles

Articles should be easy to read and user friendly. This is the part where you should start to create articles explaining how to accomplish some of your most asked questions and publish them in the relevant categories that you have just created. We have written a post on how you can get the most out of your articles and build them with your users in mind: https://www.pacekb.com/blog/10-tips-for-creating-a-knowledge-base

You can start creating articles by visiting the Articles page in your PaceKB Dashboard, and click “+ Add New”. Once in the editor you can enter the following fields:

• Title
• Content
• Slug
• Categories
• Tags
• Excerpt
• Ordering Priority

We’re rapidly improving our article experience to include more useful features and information. Once completed, publish your article and it will be visible on your Knowledge Base. You can also save an article as a draft if you want to re-visit it later.

This is how our first article looks on our Knowledge Base. It’s already taking really good shape!

Promote it everywhere

Now it’s the fun part. You’ve created a Knowledge Base that looks incredible, looks fluent with your brand, has great categorisation and well-written articles. You now want to make sure users are getting the most out of it.

You can start small with this step with a simple social media post, or an email newsletter. However we recommend documenting every possible way customers would usually try to contact you for support and begin re-designing the workflow to work around your brand new Knowledge Base. For example, if you make use of a Support Ticket system you can have a bright alert at the top that suggests users can find an instant answer to their question on your new Knowledge Base. You can even take this one-step further and restrict posting the support request until a user has checked your Knowledge Base.

In the near future PaceKB will be rolling our support for our AI support ticket recommendation assistant which can take the content of a support ticket and automatically return recommended articles based on the content. This will make the whole user experience much cleaner resulting in a better user experience.

We hope that you found this post helpful. If you run into any issues contact our team anytime via our Live Chat.