I created an intuitive, inexpensive, knowledge base (KB) solution for Holy Family University. The site consolidated the university’s technical documentation, training tutorials, and run-books into one easy-to-search website. The site uses a customized WordPress theme, so contributors aren’t required to have any special skills or software in order to submit or edit KB articles.

It’s pretty common for an institution to host a knowledge base on their intranet, but the university had decommissioned their intranet prior to my employment with them. As a result, I had to consider alternative hosting.

Initially I considered using one of the the school’s two available cloud drives (Google Drive and OneDrive) to host a de facto knowledge base. Cloud drives are not ideal platforms for KB’s, but they’re fast and available when timelines are pressing. However, users of one cloud platform almost always find the alternative intolerable, and since our faculty and staff were basically split on which cloud platform they had chosen to adopt, either option would lead to 50% of our users being unhappy.

I wanted users to be immediately at ease with our interface, so I began to look for a WordPress theme that met that simple requirement. I enthusiastically settled on the KnowAll theme from HeroThemes, which offered dedicated knowledge base functionality and a clean, intuitive navigation.

It took an afternoon to install WordPress and the theme on our school servers, plus a few more hours working with marketing to customize it with university colors and branding. The result has been a useful and ever-growing support tool for IT and an easy-to-use, self-help tool for our faculty, staff, and students – all for about $150.