How to Build a Help Center in Notion

1. Introduction to Notion and its help center template
2. Sharing pages with a limited group of people
3. Customizing the help center template
4. Adding sub-pages and customizing their icons and cover images
5. Adding and formatting content in sub-pages
6. Linking to other pages and syncing content from other articles
7. Publishing the help center to the web
8. Conclusion and next steps for maintaining and updating the help center

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If you're currently building a business from the ground up, you may be looking for an easy, no-frills way to set up a help center for your growing community of users. Notion is a great tool for this, and this video will show you how to build an external help center in Notion and instantly publish it to the web.

Before you start building a page in Notion, you might want to check out the template section, which features a selection of pages built by the Notion team. These templates can help you speed up page building and give you ideas on how to structure your information. For this video, we'll stick with the help center template. To add it to your workspace, click "Use this template." Your new template will be added to the private section of your sidebar, where only you have access to it.

While you're still working on this page, you may want to share it with a limited group of people. To do this, go to the share menu and click anywhere in the rectangle or on the invite button. Then search for a team member's name or email in the search bar and select them. You can repeat this process for as many people as you'd like to invite. Once your list of invitees is ready, you can choose their access level and hit invite. From now on, this page can be fully accessed by the people you chose, while the rest of the company won't be able to see it.

Now, you can start editing the page to make it your own, using the template's sample content as guidance. You might want to stick to the headings and columns in the template, or you could decide to move them around, add more categories, change the copy, or delete the whole thing - whatever makes sense for your team. For example, you can start by typing out each help center article, ready for publication, and placing them in their corresponding column. Then, turn these titles into pages by manually selecting them, clicking on any one of the six dot icons, and selecting "Turn into a page."

All of these new sub-pages will now sit under the "Help Center" page, which will serve as your future website's home page. You can add an icon for each page by clicking on the default icon and selecting an emoji from the list. You can also change the page's icon and cover image to better reflect your company's brand - click on the icon to change it, or even upload your company logo.

You can turn the first paragraph into a callout block and use background colors to clearly show headings and subheadings. This is the final look for a help center home page. The next step would be to jump into each sub-page and paste in their corresponding content.

In this article, we will go over how to share pages in Acme. To start, you can paste plain text into the body of the page to mirror the home page. You can also turn your titles into headings and subheadings, add background colors, create callout boxes for tips, and add screenshots to explain further. If you have existing support content in the form of YouTube or Loom videos, you can simply paste the link to embed them into your new help center.

To create columns inside your page, select the content you'd like to move and hover over any six dot icon. Then, drag and drop it next to another block. You can easily link to other pages by typing the "add" key followed by the name of the article. This will automatically create a backlink in the page you are mentioning.

You may also want to copy and paste pieces of content from other articles into your current article. For example, this section mentions guests at Acme. While guests are not the topic of this article, your readers could benefit from this paragraph from the guests article that briefly explains what Acme guests are. To do this, select the text blocks, copy them, and paste them into your article. After pasting, you will be given the option to paste and sync your content. Click on "paste and sync" to create an instance of the copied blocks on this new page. Synced content is indicated by a red ring, and editing in one page will change other instances in real time. Now, your content can remain up to date everywhere it's being featured.

Once you've uploaded and structured all your content, the last step would be to turn this page into a website. From the share menu, turn the "share to web" toggle on. This will automatically publish your page to the web via the URL that appears in this box. You can turn on search engine indexing, but turn off the option to allow duplicatist template. Leave the editing and comments toggles off. To simplify your URL, you can go to settings and members, then to settings and select your page under "public home page." If you can't find it right away, use the search bar to look it up.

Your public homepage can be accessed via this link, which features your domain name followed by ".notion.site." This is the URL you can use to share your brand new help center with your users. Click on the link to copy it to your clipboard, then hit update to save your changes.

Now, you have an entire website ready to be used and consulted by your users. To see other ways people choose to display and organize information in Notion, you can check out the template gallery. You'll find a selection of beautiful templates to duplicate, some of which were created by the community of Notion users.

In just a few minutes, we showed you how to build an entire help center from scratch and fully customize it to your and your team's needs. You can use Notion to draft text, add videos, images, and synced content, while keeping work within a select group of people. What's more, you can publish your pages in one click, and edits to your pages will update in real time, all without using precious engineering hours. Enjoy building your very own help center with Notion!

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