Writing an article

Articles are written in Help Center. Pick a collection, choose New article, and type.

Title and subtitle

Title is the question your article answers, written the way a customer would ask it.

Subtitle is one line summarising the answer. It appears under the title in lists and search results, and it's what decides whether someone clicks. It's easy to skip and worth not skipping.

Press / for anything else

The one keystroke to remember. Typing / on an empty line opens a menu of everything you can insert:

• Heading 2 and Heading 3

• Bullet list and Numbered list

• Quote

• Image and Video

• Link to article — an internal link to another article, which keeps working if you rename things

Select text to get bold, italic and links.

Use Heading 2 for your sections

Heading 2 is the workhorse. Your article's contents list — shown beside it on the public page — is built from your Heading 2s, so they're also your reader's navigation.

Heading 3 exists for sub-points within a section and doesn't appear in the contents.

An article with only one Heading 2 gets no contents list at all, since a one-item list is just clutter. Two or more and it appears.

Saving and publishing

Save draft stores your work privately. Set live publishes it.

They're separate on purpose, and editing a published article changes only the draft until you publish again. See Drafts and publishing.

Preview

Preview shows the article as a reader will see it, which is worth a look before publishing — particularly for anything with images or long code blocks.

Length

Short is better. If an article is long because it covers several things, split it — one subject per article reads better and answers better. See Collections and articles.