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Ritza Documentation

Creating your documentation site

You’ve built something great, but now you want to show it to your customers and let them use it without any handholding.

You need technical documentation. But how do you get started?

This project aims to help you both through instructions (each page contains advice and guides about how to create your own docs) but also by example (you can clone this project and use it as a starting point).

Writing an introduction page

One of the first pages you’ll want to write is an introduction, like this one. Your landing page already introduces your proudct, but at a high level. Often people who have read your marketing site will be saying “I don’t really understand what it is”. On this page, you should dial down the marketing as much as possible. You’re still convincing the reader that you’ll help them, but much more pragmatically.

Don’t use phrases like “we make it easy” or “everything in one place, finally”, or “let us handle x so you can focus on y”.

Rather describe (in a summarized way) exactly what your offering does. Include screenshots, code examples, or anything else concrete to help your reader ‘grok’ what problem you solve and how.

In our case, we give you templates and instructions to set up your technical documentation.

Decisions you need to make

If you start from scratch you’ll need to figure out a lot about technical documentation on your own including how to:

  • Evaluate different free and paid documentation platforms and choose one
  • Set it up and configure it, and what plugins or extensions you need
  • Host it and how this relates to hosting your main landing page
  • Structure the repository behind your technical documentation, and whether it should be a monolith with your main codebase or separate
  • Present code samples and diagrams
  • Present screenshots and host image and video assets
  • Optimize SEO
  • Track visits
  • Write the documentation (this is the hard part, see Ritza’s zero-to-one offering if you need help).

If you use this template, we’ve made all of the decisions for you, while still providing other options for you to branch into if they better match your needs.

See a summary of how to get to an MVP of your technical documentation in the Quickstart section, or read through the other pages for more details.