What is the best online help system you’ve seen?

Question

A lot of areas of web development have good resources on best practices. One area that doesn't seem to have a standard is the way "help" is offered. So I'd like to compile a list of sites that have really good online help systems. I'd like to see sites that have a good FAQ section, getting started guide, a searchable knowledge base, searchable articles or topic based wiki, video and textual walktroughs, and user contributed support.

So if any sites come to mind that you've found the help to be actually helpful (i.e. something you have used with repeated success), it would be great to hear about it.

(by help system, I don't mean a general help site like SO or CodeProject, I mean a help system specifically for a product/app/site. For example http://basecamphq.com/help/ is pretty good, but I can see room for improvement)

Answer 1

Stackoverflow

Answer 2

I think jQuery's Documentation site is very well thought-out and written.

Answer 3

http://www.experts-exchange.com/ before they went so commercial.

Answer 4

I like the MSDN site. It is very consistent and I can almost always count on there being a good example usage. The biggest problem with it is that the interface is a bit clunky. Also, for some of the rarely used Windows API calls, the MSDN is unhelpful (aka, tells me nothing more than the cryptic function name already tells me) or is just plain wrong.

Answer 5

the MATLAB documentation is very complete: it covers every aspect of the language and includes a lot of sample code. it is also well indexed into google, which allows to answer almost any question about matlab in less than 5 minutes.

Answer 6

CodeIgniter User Guide - very clear, helpful, and one of the main reasons I started with CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

Answer 7

I've found Amazon's and Newegg's help sections reasonably useful. Both make the most popular content easy to get to (you can track what content is most popular through your web analytics), and both categorize their content into well-organized hierarchies to make it easy to find what you're looking for.

The top criterion for a good help system, in my opinion, is excellent search capabilities. Even for desktop apps, I often find it easier to Google for an answer to a question rather than trying to navigate whatever builtin help they provide. For a web application, it's even more important to both build a good search engine into your help site and get your help site indexed by Google so that users can jump to what they want rather than having to figure out your organization.

Having a community content section on each page, as MSDN does, can be a very good way to find out areas where your documentation is lacking and to permit users to fill in the blanks.

Answer 8

The SGI STL documentation is easier to use and browse than any other STL documentation I've ever seen. It's horrifically out of date now, but still a nice example of what good reference documentation looks like.