User Facing Documentation
Unless your app is very simple, it makes sense to create a manual to document how to use it.
Tip
If your app is intuitive to use and has a good UI/UX, then ideally users will rarely have to consult the user manual.
Documentation Software
The recommended documentation software to use for user-facing documentation is Featurebase. Featurebase comes in several tiers, including a free tier. The recommended tier to use in this guide is the "Starter" tier costing $59 per month when billed monthly. This allows you to use a custom domain and comes with many additional features compared to the free tier.
Featurebase also comes with other features which we will use in later sections of this guide, such as changelogs, roadmaps, surveys and collecting user feedback.
Tip
If your budget does not allow for the paid tiers of Featurebase, you can also use the free tier or not use Featurebase at all. At least on the documentation side Featurebase can be easily replaced with free options such as Material for MkDocs.
The other features such as surveys and collecting user feedback are a bit harder to replace at a lower price point, however you can always implement your own custom survey and feedback solution if you need one. Naturally this will cost you more time (instead of money) and it will be hard to match Featurebase's quality and extensive featureset with a custom solution.
Setup
Start by signing up for an account with Featurebase. Sign up for the "Starter" plan. You should get a free trial period initially. If you haven't already done so, create an "Organization" in Featurebase. Select all of the features you need when prompted.
You should now already have an empty documentation available at
Branding
You can set a custom logo and colour scheme for your public-facing Featurebase pages. Since we don't have a logo yet we can leave this to the default logo for now. In a later section of this guide we will create a logo for our app and web presence.
For the theme, personally I prefer dark mode. To configure your preferred theme go to your dashboard and click on the "Settings" icon:
Choose "Branding" from the "Branding & Customizations" setting and configure your preferred theme, e.g. "Dark" is the configured theme for Epic Fantasy Forge:
Custom Domain
To make the Featurebase documentation page available from the custom domain you purchased earlier in the Registering a domain name section of this guide, go to your organization's dashboard and click on the "Settings" icon:
Open the "Custom Domains" accordion and choose "Help Center". Enter the desired custom domain name and click "Save". In the case of Epic Fantasy Forge we want the user documentation to be available from documentation.epicfantasyforge.com.
Now go to your Cloudflare dashboard and click on your domain:
Open the "DNS" accordion and select "Records":
Click on the "Add record" button and fill the form as follows:
- Type
- Select "CNAME"
- Name
- Put the desired subdomain here. For example, for Epic Fantasy Forge we put "documentation" here as we want the documentation page to be available from documentation.epicfantasyforge.com.
- Target
- Populate this value with "customdomains.featurebase.app" as instructed by Featurebase.
- Proxy status
- Enable the proxy status in order to protect your documentation page from DDoS attacks.
Go back to the Featurebase custom domains configuration page and refresh the "SSL Certificate Status" periodically. It should go to the "Active" state within 10 minutes, although it can take up to several hours depending on how long it takes for your new DNS record to propagate.
After some time, usually within 10 minutes but sometimes it can take up to several hours, your documentation page should now be available from your custom domain. For example on Epic Fantasy Forge the documentation page is available from documentation.epicfantasyforge.com:
