📚 Introduction

Welcome to the Documentation Site Builder Guide — your comprehensive resource for learning how to create, build, and maintain high-quality documentation sites for any kind of project, product, or organization.

Whether you’re a solo developer, technical writer, open-source contributor, startup team, or enterprise content strategist, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know about building a complete, maintainable, and professional documentation site from scratch.

Docaroo was created having in mind the main things that can transform writing good documentation into a painful task. We wanted to create a product that allows you to focus on what is important and not on to learn technical things to be able to write your documentation. So, we choose markdown as the base of writing, nothing new here, all similar products do the same. But, on this base we created a bunch of components and content items that makes your life easier and also lets you to enrich your documents with quality content such as different media, Figma design and whiteboards, Excel table and charts and many others. In simple words, focus on writing, not on learning how to write.

Of course, the basics of markdown must be known, but how difficult is to learn to use headings, is even easier than heading style in Word. And that’s pretty much all you need to know. Apart from this, take look to how simple is to use pre-defined components and content items, how powerful is to create reusable content and place it anywhere in your docs while maintaining consistency when is needed to change the content, enjoy importing content from other external sources and keep it in sync … and many more!

🚀 What Is This Guide?

This guide is a step-by-step manual that explains:

How to plan, structure, and organize documentation
How to choose the right tools and technologies
How to build a fully functional documentation site
How to style and customize your site for branding
How to publish and maintain your site efficiently

📌 Who Is This For?

This guide is suitable for:

Developers who want to document APIs, libraries, or frameworks
Product teams building internal or customer-facing documentation
Technical writers looking to improve structure and clarity
Open-source maintainers aiming to create onboarding guides
Educators and trainers documenting tutorials or curricula
Anyone who wants to build a knowledge base or help center

No prior experience with documentation systems is required — we start from the basics and build up.

🧱 What Will You Learn?

By the end of this guide, you will understand:

1. Documentation Strategy

Identifying your audience
Structuring documentation types: tutorials, references, FAQs, etc.

2. Tooling & Frameworks

Markdown best practices
Choosing deployment platforms (e.g., GitHub Pages, Netlify)

3. Site Architecture

Folder structures and content organization
Sidebar and navigation
Search and indexing setup

4. Content Writing & Style

Clear writing principles
Terminology consistency
Code block formatting and annotations
Accessibility considerations

5. Theming & Customization

Branding your docs
Adding custom styles
Creating reusable components

6. Publishing & Maintenance

Continuous deployment
Changelogs
Community contributions
Keeping docs up to date

🛠️ Prerequisites

To follow along with this guide, you’ll need:

Basic familiarity with Git and GitHub
A working knowledge of Markdown
A development environment
Access to a browser and a text editor (e.g., VS Code)

📁 What’s in This Documentation?

This site is divided into logical sections, each building on the previous one:

Getting Started – Overview, goals, and tooling setup
Planning Your Docs – Audience analysis, content hierarchy, and types
Building the Site – Installing, configuring, and running your documentation framework
Writing Great Docs – Tips, formatting, structure, and consistency
Customization – Layout, themes, branding, and interactive elements
Deployment – Hosting, CI/CD pipelines, versioning, and analytics
Best Practices – Accessibility, localization, SEO, and maintenance workflows
Examples & Templates – Starter projects, reusable snippets, and content scaffolds

🧭 Why Docs Matters

Well-written documentation is more than just a user manual:

It helps users understand and use your product
It reduces support burden and onboarding time
It builds trust, credibility, and community
It enables contribution and collaboration
It preserves institutional knowledge

Good documentation isn’t just nice to have — it’s a core part of product success.

✅ Let’s Get Started

Use the sidebar to navigate to the first section and begin your journey. Each topic includes examples, templates, and real-world tips to help you go from blank page to beautiful docs.