How we made our own help center with Notion

Learn how we built our own custom help center using Algolia, Tailwind UI, and Notion as our CMS. Find out why we chose to build rather than buy and how easy it is to create new articles with Notion.

How we made our own help center with Notion
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Welcome to the new year, and welcome to the new Fillout help center! We're excited to share with you how we built it and why we chose to build our own help center rather than buying one off the shelf.
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Goals for our help center

First, let's talk about our goals for the help center. We wanted a solution that would let us host at http://fillout.com/help, allow us to easily author help articles in a way that was similar to using Notion, and create SEO-ready pages without being tied to a particular vendor. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a third-party tool that met all of these requirements, so we decided to build our own solution.

How we built it

To build the help center, we used a few different tools. First, we used TailwindUI's excellent "Docs" template as the foundation for our design. This gave us a solid foundation for organizing and presenting our help articles in a clear and concise way.
Next, we integrated Algolia for search functionality. This allows users to quickly and easily find the articles they need, no matter how large our library of articles grows.
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Finally, we used react-notion-x to turn our Notion pages into static HTML and CSS. This allowed us to author our articles in Notion, which we already use as our content management system, and then automatically convert them into the format needed for our help center.

The result

The result is a help center that is easy for us to update and maintain, and that provides a great user experience for our customers. And the best part is, creating a new article is as simple as making a new Notion page.
So if you haven't already, be sure to check out the new Fillout help center at https://fillout.com/help. We hope you find it helpful!
 
Dominic Whyte

Written by

Dominic Whyte

Dominic is a co-founder at Fillout. He previously worked in engineering & product at Retool. Prior to Retool, he started Cheer (backed by Sequoia and acquired by Retool in 2020).

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