Organizing and structuring content

Now is the time to start structuring your content. Most knowledge base solutions will have a way to group content by categories, topics and/or sections.

In Timelapse, sections are the highest level at which content can be grouped. Sections can be of multiple types and the categorization will change according to the type.

At a high level, most knowledge base solutions will follow a categorization similar to this:

  • Sections
    • Topics
      • Articles

The first thing to address is if you need multiple sections. In a lot of cases, a single section is fine as you will simply use topics to group related articles together.

Multiple sections are useful when you have very different type of content. Here's an example:

  • [Section] Using our product
    • [Topic] Account
    • [Topic] Billing
    • [Topic] Managing content
  • [Section] API Documentation for Developers
    • [Topic] Authentication
    • [Topic] Making Requests
  • [Section] Getting started guide
    • [Topic] ...

In the example above, content for developers is very different that content for actual users of the product. It's a different audience and the covered topics will be very different. As for the getting started guide, it will most likely use a different kind of layout, one that's fit for user guides and manuals.

Topics are then used to group related articles together.

A good way to organize and structure your content is as follows:

  • Audience or high level themes
    • Topics
      • Articles

And again, it's possible that simply grouping by topics will be enough if you don't have a lot of content.
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