Today everything is stored online, and documentation is not an exception. If you want to publish your documentation, developers have created everything for you to make this process easier. In my post, I’ll describe the publishing possibilities from two points of view — how to publish documentation to show it as part of your portfolio, and what if your company needs online documentation.

Online Documentation for Your Portfolio

If you want to create an online portfolio with your tech writing content, you can publish your documentation in different ways:

• Create your website. If you don’t have enough experience for it, you can use WordPress. A guide on how to create a website using the platform, read here: How to Create Your Own WordPress Website (The Easy Way).
• Publish your documentation on GitHub. There, you can create well-maintained docs and make sure they receive a high level of care they deserve. More details arehere.
• Use an online documentation tool. Nowadays, help authoring tools are very popular among technical writers. You can use a HAT as a tool for writing itself or as a platform for your portfolio.

Online Documentation for Your Company

Previously, technical writers create documentation in a printed form. Watch the history of technical writing:

Nowadays, when everything is stored in clouds, online documentation tools become more popular than ordinary word processors, and here are strong reasons (these reasons are based on my experience of using ClickHelp, other help authoring tools may not have below features):

• Your documents will be password-protected.
• It’s easy to create documentation. Professional tools support WYSIWYG and HTML editors, so you don’t need to learn how to use these tools, your MS Word skills are enough.
• You can work with your team members, and nothing will be missed due to notifications, version history and more.
• And more.

So, online documentation tools allow users to publish documentation quickly — you don’t have to ask your devs to publish new topics. Here is the publication process (I took screenshots from the ClickHelp online help page):

• Click Current Project and select Publish/Export.

• Specify some settings.

• Set Publication visibility.

• You’ve published your project.

As you can see, everything is easy, so tech writers can work independently from dev teams. Moreover, if you create internal documentation, you can also use an online documentation tool just choose the Restricted or Private publication visibility depending on your needs.

If your company needs online documentation, I recommend that you try the help authoring tool.

How do you publish documentation?