NWE Help: Make Help Pages: Principles

NWE Home :: Help :: Make

When we decided to redo the help pages, and came up with a structure, we considered the following most important:

We don't need to reinvent the wheel. There is lots of good stuff to link to on the servers already. Some of it needs to be redivided and updated, but that's a lot easier than rewriting it from scratch. External links are also a viable option. The stuff just needs to be easier to find.
One central general help page and subsequent children will replace the multiple start points of "NWE Handbook," "NWE Help Index," and "NWE FAQs." This will make help easier to navigate and will enable us to collect some 'lost' information. The NWE home page would be a bit simpler (or we could add something in the place of the help files).
The central pages uses a subject-oriented browse method. Most problems can be narrowed down quickly to a broad subject area -- email, web authoring, file management -- so why not narrow the help down that way as well?
Users are steered toward a solution. Many students have responsed to the help pages with, "I don't know where to start." We can start to fix that with an index that has clear distinctions BUT is not a linkfest, like the old pages were.
Smaller pages are better. One stop shopping pages are a pain to edit, require careful indexing or searching, and usually have a greater context that is hidden. Smaller pages are also easier to print and can be linked from a variety of locations.
Our current design motif is decent, and modular. New help pages should use it and be compatible with it, not override it. Design modifications should be done to the headers, footer, and to the CSS file, not to the pages themselves.