Case Study: Why should you move from WordPress to a modern documentation system

Outcomes

• ✅ Zero dependency on developers for hosting and managing documentation look and feel
• ✅ Reduce technical writing resource requirements by 50%
• ✅ Save up to 30% of time spent in content development

The Benefits

• Empowered technical writers to handle high-frequency documentation updates, increased scalability needs of continuously evolving product documentation and boost productivity of content development.
• Allows technical writers to focus on content development rather than worry about information hosting and layout dependencies. At the same time, the tool gives control by allowing technical writer to retain the flexibility of customisable look and feel in a contemporary documentation layout.
• Intuitive and easy to build simple navigation controls in documentation make it easy for readers to access and search for information.
• WYSIWYG tooling makes collaboration easier among various technical documentation stakeholders involved in content development, review and approval.
• Accelerates quality documentation delivery with modern look and feel.

Company Overview

Founded in 2014, the studied California based company is the leading software platform provider for agile data. The company counts some of the world's largest financial, retail, technology, healthcare, oil & gas, pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies in the Fortune 100 and Global Fortune 500 as its customers.

Due to the nature of their documentation and business, the customer has requested their name to be redacted from this case study which was first published in 2019.

The company hosts over 1000 pages of documentation with DeveloperHub as of the publishing date.

Documentation Objectives

The technical writing team is entrusted with the responsibility of creating quality documentation assets that enhance their customer experience. Working within the time and resource constraints demanded by a continuously evolving cutting edge technology product, the technical writers collaborate across geographies for writing, reviewing, publishing and sharing product information with key stakeholders.

The Challenge

Engineering resources were a bottleneck

Before switching over to DeveloperHub, the studied company used WordPress based content development process that required additional support for hosting their documentation created using WordPress tooling. Following are some of the key issues that made them look for a better solution:

• WordPress usage required dealing with HTML and CSS formats in order to define and manage their documentation layout. This caused an additional dependency of technical writers and content developers on software engineering resources with the requisite skills to handle documentation layout modifications and address issues. The added complexity slowed the rate of content development.
• Hosting of WordPress based documentation was handled by another development resource located in a different geography and that increased dependency and turn-around time for documentation updates.
• Creating contemporary look and feel for documentation required significant effort and resource outside the technical writer’s domain of expertise. Managing change was tedious.
• Another limiting factor with their old documentation process was the complexity in managing the overall documentation structure and its organisation to aid ease of information access using navigation controls.
• The new team members in technical writing team faced steep learning curve with their documentation system that hampered productivity.

Why DeveloperHub?

The complete documentation is now written and published using DeveloperHub. The documentation productivity is no longer hostage to the many issues they were facing with content development, the CSS, plugins and hosting with their older documentation system. With DeveloperHub all the documentation development, review and publishing processes are just a single button-click and that saves a lot of time for them.

Technical writers can focus more on documentation instead of spending time looking for developer resources to help them in fixing issues related to documentation management and hosting. New team members can ramp up faster as the documentation editor is very intuitive, unlike the earlier tool that had a steep learning curve and additional skills besides content development. With DeveloperHub documentation cycles and updates become simpler and faster, giving a boost to API documentation for them.

Their users find DeveloperHub easy to use tool for documentation. The frequent updates and enhancements make the documentation process very interesting and highly productive. The look and feel of the documents generated using DeveloperHub matches closely with what the technical writers require for ease of information access. In addition, the technical writers experienced greater flexibility in content development with the product’s customisation capabilities such as fonts, colours, simple, intuitive navigation controls and various other layout options. Lastly, continuous support from the DeveloperHub support team ensured that all the challenges faced by the information development team were addressed on time helping them in timely release of important product information.

Summary

Technical writing process got a 3X boost with the adoption of DeveloperHub managed documentation service. With its powerful, Medium-like modern WYSIWYG editor, DeveloperHub managed documentation hosting service helped the studied company in writing beautiful user guides, product and API documentation with no dependency on documentation hosting or layout tooling knowledge. Documentation team can now publish it online by a simple click of a button!

Do you need help moving from a static CMS to a realtime modern collaboration tool for customer-facing documentation? Give us a shout.