Publish Your Content as a Help Center with Scroll Viewport

6 min read /

To make your documentation accessible and useful to your readers, you can turn your Confluence space(s) into an online help center or knowledge base.With Scroll Viewport, your team can collaborate on documentation in Confluence while giving your readers a cohesive online help center experience. Complete with a custom domain, portal page, site-wide search, and simple navigation, all presented within a customizable theme.

With Scroll Viewport you can:

  • Decide whether to make your help center available publicly, or restrict it so you have control over who sees your content.
  • Customize the experience of the help center to fit with your corporate identity. It also fits on any screen size.
  • Give readers access to multiple versions of your documentation you created in Scroll Documents or Scroll Versions using a version picker.
  • Integrate with third-party tools like Google Analytics and Cloudflare Web Analytics, customer support systems, and other Confluence apps.

Help Center Article Page

Our team at K15t loves being one of the many teams using the Scroll Viewport for our Confluence help center. Check out some help center examples to get inspiration for what your team can create using Confluence and Scroll Viewport:

Customize Your Scroll Viewport Help Center

Scroll Viewport includes a customizable Help Center theme you can use to turn your Confluence content into a great looking online help center in just a few minutes. Customize the theme to add your own branding — no coding needed, preview what it will look like, and go live with your new help center.

Customize the look and feel of your help center

You can quickly customize the colors, images, navigation, and layout of your help center to create an online help experience that's unique to your brand. Visual changes are made without the need for development skills. You can also add a custom domain to make sure you're on-brand and recognizable to your users.

Theme Editor

With the many many ways to customize your help center, no two are the same. So your readers will see beautiful extension of your brand. Here are two variants of the same help center:

Example 1

Example 2

macro icon

Explore an example help center site to see how your Confluence documentation can be fully customized to fit your brand.

Adding Confluence documentation to your help center

To create a unified experience, you can add multiple Confluence spaces to your help center that readers can navigate to and search from a central portal page. This enables you to share help documentation for multiple products within a single help center, making it easier for your users to find what they're looking for.

Portal Page

How your Confluence content is managed and discovered

The content displayed in the help center, like titles, headings, and related links is brought in and controlled in two ways. To enable your team to quickly modify the messaging and titles throughout, content is:

  • Created and updated by your team within Confluence
  • Defined and updated using the Scroll Viewport theme settings you've selected

You also have granular controls to improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of individual pages—or sections of pages—using a Scroll Viewport macro to customize the metadata that's indexed by search engines, such as Google.

Control settings such as how certain macros appear

Give Access to Multiple Versions of Your Documentation

If you version your documentation using Scroll Documents (Confluence Cloud) or Scroll Versions (Confluence Server or Data Center), you get to decide what version(s) you want available to your readers and when.

Version availability

You can share:

  • The latest version only  - This a great option for SaaS products, and you can use versions internally to maintain an archive of content, just in case. Your team can continue to work on the content behind the scenes and none of the changes will go live until you decide to publish.
  • Multiple versions  - This is ideal for situations where not all readers are using the latest version of your product. You have full control over which versions readers can view and which ones are only available to authors.

Scroll Viewport site with the version picker expanded

Enhanced publishing control

While versions are a great way to control the lifecycle of your content, Scroll Viewport gives you additional control over when that content gets published. For example, if you only want to publish the latest version of your documentation on your help center, your team can collaborate on documentation in Confluence, and those changes won't be shared until you update your site in Scroll Viewport.

Integrate your Confluence Help Center with Customer Support Systems, and Analytics

There are a number of integrations available for your help center. They can enhance the experience your users have with your help center and also help your team to improve your Confluence documentation over time.

Integrate with a customer support system

Sometimes your documentation doesn't have the answers users are looking for. No worries, you can point your users in the right direction by integrating your customer support system with your help center or knowledge base. Customers can then contact your service desk straight from your documentation to get the answers they need. Embed popular customer support systems such as Jira Service Management Cloud and Zendesk to complete the help journey for your users.

Integrate with Google Analytics or Cloudflare Web Analytics

To understand which pieces of content users find most useful, integrate your Confluence help center with Google Analytics or Cloudflare Web Analytics. Over time, you'll be able to improve your content with the knowledge of how your users consume it.

You can integrate your help center with Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console as well.

Integrate with popular Confluence apps

Scroll Viewport works with Confluence apps like Gliffy, draw.io Diagrams, Open API Documentation for Confluence, and many other popular apps on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Learn more about Scroll Viewport.