Custom website development services
in Fremont

For a company that makes something, the documentation section is the part of the site that gets used. Datasheets, manuals, drawings, firmware, certificates. It is also, on most sites, a folder of files with dates in the names.

The first requirement is that a document belongs to a product and a revision. Not to a page. A specification is a record: part number, revision, date, status, and what changed. Once those are fields, a page can show the current one and keep the history reachable.

History matters more here than anywhere else. Somebody supporting equipment installed years ago needs the revision that shipped with it, not the current one. Deleting old documents to keep the page tidy breaks exactly that person.

So superseded material stays, labelled clearly, with a link to the current version. Removing it silently is the failure mode that generates support calls.

Firmware needs the same treatment plus one more thing: the order of installation. If a device must pass through an intermediate version, the page has to say so in a way nobody can skip.

Search has to reach inside the files. A person types a part number that appears only inside a document, and a search that reads page titles finds nothing. Extracting text at upload makes the archive usable.

Then the access question. Some material is public, some is for distributors, some is under agreement. That is a rule per document, not a folder somebody remembers to protect.

Format is worth stating on the link. Size and type, so a person on a phone in a plant knows what they are about to download.

We ask who publishes a revision and how, before designing any of it. If the answer is that a developer uploads files when asked, the section will be out of date within a year, and the specification on the site will quietly disagree with the one in the box.

A changelog looks internal. For anybody who depends on your product, it is a primary page, and its absence is read as a lack of activity.

Three audiences use it. They want different things. A customer wants to know what changed for them. A technical integrator wants to know what breaks. A prospect wants to know the product is alive.

That argues for one page with structure. Not three pages. Each entry dated, version numbered, and split into what was added, what changed, what was fixed, and anything that requires action.

The last category is the one that earns trust. Anything a reader must do before upgrading belongs at the top, marked, in plain words. Burying it in a list of improvements is how somebody upgrades on a Friday and discovers it on Monday.

Write for the person affected rather than the person who did the work. Fixed an issue where the export omitted the final row is useful. Refactored the export module is not, however accurate it is.

Give it a feed. Add a mailing option. People who depend on a product want to be told rather than to remember to look.

Each entry needs a stable address of its own, because people link to individual releases in support threads and tickets.

There is a decision about depth that should be made once rather than argued each time. Every fix, or only what a customer would notice? Both are defensible. Inconsistency is what makes the page look unreliable.

The discipline is publishing it on the day of the release. A changelog updated in batches every few months stops being a record and becomes a marketing page with dates on it.

When a product is sold through partners, the public site is only half the job. The other half is what a reseller needs to sell it, and that usually lives in an inbox.

The list is short and predictable. Current price lists. Images without the background. Specification sheets in a format that can be pasted into a quote. Logos with rules for using them. Stock and lead times. A way to register a deal so two partners do not chase the same customer.

Access is the first design decision. A login for partners is the obvious answer and it adds an account to manage. A link that is hard to guess is weaker and far easier to use. The right choice depends on whether anything behind it is confidential.

Price lists need versions and dates on the face of them. A partner quoting from a file saved in March is a support problem, and the file itself should say when it stops being valid.

Assets have to be in the formats the work actually uses. A brand page offering one vector file does not help somebody assembling a slide deck at eight in the evening.

Then the lead question, which is the one that causes friction. Enquiries from a partner territory arriving through the public form go somewhere, and if that somewhere is your sales team, the partner will notice. Deciding the routing rule in advance is cheaper than the conversation afterwards.

A partner locator on the public site is the counterpart to all of it. It needs to be current, which means somebody owns it, and it needs to say what each partner actually does rather than listing names.

Co-branded material is worth building as a template rather than as files. A partner who can generate a sheet with their own details attached will use it. One who has to ask a designer will not.

We ask to see the last twenty emails the partner team sent. Whatever is attached to them is the specification for this section, and it is usually four documents and a logo.