When I took on our company IT knowledge base I had come from using SharePoint, which I loved, and was quite underwhelmed by what we were doing in our ServiceNow knowledge base. People had previously attempted to set some standards and templated KBs but it wasn't great, lots of things bothered me.
Using Article Templates and CSS I have now achieved what I think is a good, clean and consistent look and feel to our KBs that we can build fairly quickly. We've made good progress and I feel it is important to do this because it makes articles look professional, cared for (and fit into the company brand a little more) and we are now competing more and more with M365 products which can do wonderful things easily so I wanted to show people we could do more than just plain text and images.
So I wanted to ask what others have done to their knowledge KBs to manage the look and feel? Are you able to show me any examples of what you have done?
I have added a sample of one of mine. we can use this template to build KBs with multiple sections, using a Table of Contents to jump to each one, and we can include videos and FAQs in accordions. Because its an article Template, any fields left blank do not show so it's quite versatile. We also use KB templates to insert pre-set headings into the main part of the KB.
I am quite happy with what we have achieved but I find that not many people pay attention to what goes into managing a knowledge base, least of all the effort that has gone into making this work with no budget money, no paid for plugins, etc, just my time and effort. I've nothing to compare against so it will be good to find out what others have done. Anyway, I hope you like it and if there is anything you want to know about what I did please ask.
Hi there. Thanks for your feedback! 🙂 I honestly felt that making our KBs look good was a key to making use of our knowledge a success, if they are well presented then the audience will feel more confident that they are being looked after so they can trust the content. I wanted to achieve these things;
- KB is my knowledge base article look good
- KBs are easy to create/manage
- Avoid using our developers (that process is slow and costly)
Not everyone is comfortable with HTML/CSS so I set about creating my CSS so that the author can just use the editor buttons to drop elements in such as accordions and tables, and the CSS does the rest. They don't need to touch fonts or font sizes, I've gone as far as removing those options in some instance. I find that the easier I make this process the easier it is to get people creating content, so sticking to the standard editor icons that everyone is familiar with works well.
Here's an overview of what I've done...
Firstly, I use Article Templates. Then, I style each field how I want, in my case I have an Introduction with a background colour that matches the portal theme. The 'Before you begin' field has a border, etc, so that when each of these has content it will always look the same.
What I've done is added a style sheet into the Introduction field, which is a mandatory field, so that it adds <style</style> tags with my CSS in between. For example;
Here's how it looks when editing;
Resulting KB article;
I've set my CSS so that I can change one colour code in the KB Introduction source code to re-colour the tables, should I want to;
So it looks like this;
If I wanted to start using a new colour scheme, I could change the Article Template styles and the CSS to do that relatively easily for new KBs.
With Article Templates fields that are left empty do not appear in the KB. so that means I can leave fields blank to generate a KB that only has a list of FAQs or a video, for example;
I hope this is useful to you 🙂
