The Hidden Power of Online Manual .

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Writing software manuals is boring, isn't it? We often think: "My software is easy to use. The user interface is intuitive. Why should I waste so much time for writing the document which nobody reads anyway?" Sometimes it's true - I've never read the WinZip or Internet Explorer manuals - everything seems clear without explanations. Nevertheless, even if your manual doesn't help to your software users, it may help to you. Publish your manual online and turn its hidden power into the real benefits for your Business.

Online Manual Makes Your Web Site Visible

User manual is a huge bunch of words, the highly targeted words, which are specific for your software market. For instance, if you develop a database management system, its user guide will certainly contain such words as "database", "query", "transaction", "table", "record", and etc. On the other hand, people use these words in their queries when they are looking for a database management solution on the Google, Yahoo, or other search engine. Let the interested people to find your web site and your product. Upload your manual on your web server and make it available for indexing by search engine spiders. This area specific content will make your web site and your software more visible to potential customers. Making the user guide available online will increase your web site rank in relevant search results and will bring highly targeted traffic to web your site. Let the manual to work not only for your users, but for you as well.

Online Manual Saves Your Time

A picture worth a hundred words. Those who are engaged in user support know this for sure. When replying to user concerns, very often we have to write sentences like this "Open the Document settings dialog. Choose the External modules tab. Select the 'ABC Spell Checker' in the module list. Enter your registration key and verification code in the corresponding text fields which will appear at the bottom of the window. Then, press Activate". If your application is simple the user will likely understand you right and will do everything as you have explained. However, if your application is a complex system with lots of setting windows which behave differently in various modes, the user may be puzzled which window and which fields do you mean. In this case you risk getting into a long conversation by repeatedly explaining the same things again and again.

The screenshot could be a very helpful illustration of your explanations. You may run your application, go to the certain window, open that tab page, activate the corresponding item in the list. Then make the screenshot of the window by using Alt+PrtSc key combination or another screen capture tool, save the picture in a file, and finally attach it to your message. Sometimes it's also necessary to add callouts, annotations and other enlightenments to the screenshot picture. Thus, you have to launch your image editor and to manually draw all the elements required. As you see, it may takes up to a half hour to reply to a single message only. And how many messages are yet in the queue?

Having the screenshots prepared is a good approach which may save your time. But having screenshots already prepared together with callouts, explanations, and annotations is a great approach which will save you much more time. Most likely, you have all that stuff prepared in your software manual but it's not very polite to reply to the user: "Read that fantastic manual". User may have no idea where the manual is on the PC and on what page is the looked-for solution located. On the other hand, you may also have no time to manually cut particular pages with screenshots and related instructions from the manual and to attach them to each support message. The solution is easy. Put your manual on your web site in the form of HTML pages. Make all the pictures, screenshots with callouts, descriptions, and instructions accessible for every user. When you are processing another support request, simply insert an URL link to the appropriate page of your online manual and add just a few clarification words - more words and pictures are already on that page. You will save much time and nerve