Support Center

After we'd been using Desk.com's support system, and their knowledge base tool, it was suggested that maybe we should nix that and just create our own through Wordpress.  Since we were already using Wordpress for our blog, this seemed like a sensible option, and it would allow us to further customize the appearance of the support center and documentation (with much less effort, since we wouldn't have to be overriding all the Desk.com defaults).

The Original Plan

As I set out to set up this knew support base for docs, I thought I'd just copy the blog theme and then add each article from our existing support center to the new one.  However, as I started doing this, I realized how much I despised the blog :) -- and how much better the support center could be.  This was something that was very important to me, as I had previously spent a lot of time working support, and therefore knew from personal experience how much help our support agents needed, and how much better their lives could be if we had some decent support docs that were easy to navigate and understand.

The End Result

For the reasons mentioned above, I decided to just scrap the idea of copying from the blog and start from scratch with a blank Wordpress template, creating my own for the support center.  This ultimately turned out to be much easier, because I got to do everything the way I wanted, without worrying about fixing old issues from the blog and whatnot.  As far as I can tell, the support site is still essentially the same as when I left, with the exception of the header and main nav, which have been messed up a bit from other changes made on the main site.

NOTE: To my knowledge, Woobox no longer uses the Wordpress-based support center that I created, and have since switched back to the Desk.com knowledge base, which is why the header is messed up, and it hasn't been updated in a long while.

The knowledge base they currently use is actually something I designed and coded up quite some time ago as well, but it has been changed a bit more heavily (mostly breaking things, from what I can tell) since I last touched it.  However, the general layout appears to be similar to what I had created in the past, for both the main page, and individual articles.  You can see that version of the support center here.