A Brand New Look—What We Shipped in September

We launched HelpDocs back in April to help make better knowledge and support docs. Since then we've been spending most of our time making the backend services more reliable, faster, and generally better.

That means usually our product updates are pretty darn mundane. Bug fixes. Performance improvements. Nobody really cares what goes on behind the scenes, as long as it works. And that's how it should be.

This month we've been making some way more prominent changes though. Sure, there's been bug fixes. But there's also a new website. A new blog. A new admin dashboard. Oh, and new branding throughout.

So here's what we've been up to.

Updated Brand Style and Colors

I love your color scheme!

Nobody, ever

Our brand colors used to be a little...in your face. A blue so vibrant it'll burn your retinas right off. Yep, we got it.

Our new palette's less garish, more pastel. And in general much more consistent. We use shading extensively throughout, and there's a much clearer link between our marketing materials and the app.

Even our fonts have changed. We've switched from Helvetica (a long-time favorite) to Lato and Open Sans.

Brand New Website

The website's been totally overhauled. And good riddance to it, too.

We built the original version of our site in a couple hours. It was meant to be temporary.

But with startups, the one thing you can be sure of is that everything takes longer than you initially think it will. That's meant the website's been on the back burner for a while.

Now it's been totally updated with our new styles and colors. There's some beautiful gradients, and our layouts have been brought bang up to date. And check out that pure CSS text animation on the homepage. Neat, huh?

...and Blog

And of course the blog. If you've been here before you'd have been greeted with a sad-looking page full of mismatched fonts. And a sticky navbar that made you wanna hurl.

I feel ya.

Now it looks more consistent with our website. It's a more fluid experience, and it's a little more clear what we, y'know, do.

Same great content, but with a new (nicer) home.

Totally Overhauled Admin App

The last big change we've made is to the product. Yep, we've rebuilt the whole thing.

We're finally away from the MVP we started with, and into a version of the product we can be proud of.

Gone are the full page refreshes. Gone are the 17 libraries with their own CSS that never quite looked right.

It's snappy, nicely styled, and it works. Like, all the time.

Literally zero lines of code were used from our MVP. It's the biggest update we've ever made to any product, and we're super stoked about it.

Less Interesting Things

Of course, no product update would be complete without an obligatory mention of bug fixes. And we've done a ton.

Hundreds of GitHub issues have been opened and closed. We've been working our socks off to make the platform as reliable as possible.

Why all the updates now? Well, we had to make room for some really cool new features that we've been working on. I can't wait to show them to you in the next couple weeks.

We're really excited about the future of HelpDocs. We're making knowledge more accessible and easier to share. And we're having a blast doing it.