As we’ve been looking to bring on more talented people into the mix here at LimeCuda, one area that we’re focusing on improving is documentation. At the core of creating any documentation is a need to get expertise, knowledge, and experience out of our own heads and presented in a way that is digestible by anyone coming into our business.
With this focus, we are starting by focusing on support and procedural documentation.
Support Documentation
We are cumulatively responsible for about 200 websites with a wide array of industries and purposes. Even with great variety between sites, we do find ourselves answering some of the same questions on a regular basis… Issues around domains, SSL, and general hosting are very common for us. By creating support documentation to answer these recurring questions, we no longer have to rely on bespoke responses for these issues and can provide a quicker response with reliable and tested information.
To help us in aggregating this information, we’re working to build out this documentation within the “Docs” feature in Helpscout. If you’re an existing customer, you likely received an email about how to submit a support ticket (also powered by Helpscout). By building the documentation here, we’ll have a seamless approach for quickly adding this documentation to our email responses to your requests.
Procedural Documentation
It’s difficult to have a functioning business if you don’t document the why and how general tasks are to be performed for your business. This would include general processes like our process for handling single-developer sprints, configuring DNS, or full checklists like our checklist for a WordPress SSL / HTTPS migration. This documentation is crucial for capturing experience and lessons learned from performing some of these tasks over-and-over and passing it along to new team members when they join. These ever-evolving documents help to ensure that every time we perform a task, it is the best we’ve ever done it.
We have multiple places where we capture procedural documentation. We are a business built around an Open Source ecosystem and have a strong bent towards transparency and sharing. With that ethos, our first place for capturing this documentation is on our public resource site Fewer Than Three. This documentation is fully available to anyone to use in improving their own websites and businesses.
For things that are specific to us internally at LimeCuda, we utilize the Wiki features available within Github. This way, it is easily accessible when creating new tasks for specific projects that can be assigned to anyone on our team.