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How to Build a Perfect Wiki for Your Business

Find out how to build a stunning wiki for your business

A report by McKinsey has confirmed that:

  • A working professional spends 28% of his workweek reading and answering emails
  • 20% of a week goes in searching and gathering information

These statistics confirm that searching for information is a tough task when it is unorganized and unstructured. Many companies today are grappling with this issue, figuring out ways to manage business information meticulously for the convenience of their workforce dispersed across different locations. 

Make workforce more productive with a wiki software  Imagine information scattered haphazardly across folders in different servers and your employees struggling to fetch it one at a time when they need it the most. It is a frustrating situation and can harm your employee productivity more adversely than you can imagine. 

Further, it also affects the decision-making capability of your workforce, which results in poor choices and ultimately pulls down your business growth.

Creating a centralized corporate encyclopedia or in-house Wikipedia can be the ultimate rescue in such situations. It brings you umpteen benefits – seamless knowledge management, enhanced collaboration among employees, streamlined work processes, to name a few.

How to Create a Stunning Wiki?

Let’s see how you can create a stunning corporate wiki for your business:

1. A Suitable Template

The first thing you need to do is select a suitable professionally-designed template to create an online wiki for your business. A template is nothing but a framework with dummy content placed in it. You simply need to replace that with company-specific information. Choosing a ready-made template makes the process of creating a wiki a lot easier and seamless.

2. Write, Edit and Brand

Once you are done with selecting the template, you need to either write fresh content or upload content from existing files, whichever suits you better. Just writing isn’t enough, editing and styling your content is equally important.

WYSIWYG Editor

 An online text editor helps you to design your content with a wide array of formatting options. Further, add your company’s logo and brand name to your wiki, so that your workforce can relate to it in a better way.

Branding and Customization

3. Multimedia Can Be Magical

Remember that you are creating a wiki for a diverse workforce. While some of your employees might be comfortable with reading text, others might find a video or an image more impactful. Hence, you must sprinkle visuals across your content to provide your employees with a holistic understanding.

4. Seamless Searchability

Browsing through your wiki should be effortless for employees. For this, ensure that you cross-link relevant articles across your wiki and drive readers to more valuable content. Including a Google-like search bar can work wonders. It’s almost like giving employees a platform to search for anything they want.

For smooth navigation, a lot also depends on how structured your corporate wiki is. Adding a table of contents at the beginning of the wiki gives readers a bird’s eye view of what your wiki comprises of. It’s like a preview or a trailer before the movie starts. Also, switching between different sections becomes a lot easier when you have a table of contents in place.

5. Enhance Optimization

When it comes to an internal wiki, you need to improve it continuously for optimum results. Your employees run the search using different keywords, according to the questions they have. 

Keep track of these keywords and analyze which ones led to successful results and which failed to yield any. Insightful reports provided by ProProfs knowledge base software can be of significant help in tracking employees’ search behavior. 

Leverage this information to improve existing articles and add new content pieces to your wiki.

6. Tooltips, Lightboxes & Popups

While you are creating a wiki, do not assume that all industry-related concepts or terms are self-explanatory and your executives will have a fair idea of them. Such assumptions can lead to misunderstanding.tooltipsTo avoid this, it is best to explain technical jargons and complicated concepts using tooltips, lightboxes, and popups. This will help you guide your readers in the right direction and ensure that they get an end-to-end understanding of your business.

7. Set Workflows

Putting relevant and accurate content in your corporate wiki is crucial since you don’t want your employees to have incomplete or outdated information. This requires continuous improvement of content, which can be done quickly via workflows. 

The best wiki software allows you to set workflows and track the status of content before finally publishing it. 

Setting workflows makes it easier to keep a constant check on articles from the time they are written until they get published. So basically, you can check their quality as they pass through multiple review cycles and make sure that content is up to the mark and nothing is missed out.

8. Multi-Lingual Support

If your business is spread across the globe, catering to your diverse workforce can be challenging. An excellent way to do this is by configuring your wiki to display in different languages. It will be highly beneficial for your squad of executives who are dispersed across different locations and speak diverse languages. 

Building wikis in multiple languages is a sign that you care for your employees and want them to feel connected with your organization.

Lang

Comprehensive Wiki – an Asset for Your Business

Providing your employees with a finely-structured and comprehensive wiki is the best thing you can do for them. A central cloud-based wiki is an asset for you, given the significant role it plays in creating a positive growth curve for your brand. 

Since finding information becomes a cakewalk, the productivity of your employees shoots-up, confusion remains at a distance, and connectivity among employees becomes stronger. All of this combined results in better decisions and ultimately help your business prosper.

However, to achieve an ideal wiki, the first thing you need is a smart corporate wiki software that houses powerful features and offers flawless functionality. An inefficient software can bring all your knowledge management efforts to naught. Hence, be cautious and prudent while selecting one.

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About the author

Bryan Wills is a seasoned expert in knowledge management with over a decade of experience in the field. His expertise extends across various domains, including Security & Compliance, User Management, Knowledge Management, Software Documentation, and Customer Support. His writings not only reflect his deep understanding of these subjects but also offer practical solutions and strategies to help organizations enhance their knowledge management processes. Bryan’s work has been published in GetFeedback, CustomerThink, and Apruve.