--- schema_version: "1" id: 125259bfa5dfb8d35191b9e0814fbf50763dcfed02d9a8c8a2034cbb0a5642cb title: Prepare for Your Help Center collection: admin version: current locale: en-us portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/xcloud/264-0-0/essentials_help_center_prepare.md canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.essentials_help_center_prepare.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5 source_site: help.salesforce.com content_type: documentation content_hash: c2455df2f461f005e8be0ef5792e7541acfb8523dabc4c8a3cd7d65ee02dd259 description: Get ready to create your branded, self-service help center. Plan or write your articles and their categories, decide which topics you want to feature, and gather your branding materials. products: - Cross Cloud release: "264" --- # Prepare for Your Help Center Get ready to create your branded, self-service help center. Plan or write your articles and their categories, decide which topics you want to feature, and gather your branding materials. ### Required Editions
Essentials is available in: Lightning Experience
Available in: Essentials, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
A help center enables your customers to help themselves when they have questions or run into a common issue with your product or service. Before you dive in, let’s make sure that you have everything you need to get your help center up and running smoothly. ## Plan Your Articles Know what kinds of articles you want to publish and share with your customers before you start. If you can write some of all of your articles ahead of time, that’s even better—you can get a more accurate preview of your help center if you have some content to display. How Articles Work Articles are written and published using Salesforce Knowledge (you can publish up to 500 articles with your Salesforce Essentials subscription). You can make anyone on your team a Knowledge user so they can create and publish drafts, edit articles, and delete articles. You can have public articles and internal-only articles. We recommend planning for both, because an internal Knowledge base can help your team align and share information. For your help center, you’ll include public articles, so your customers can access your awesome content. Categorizing Your Articles When you write articles, you can organize them into categories (called data categories) and groups of categories (called data category groups). These tools help you sort your articles so your customers can do less searching. You can create categories and groups for different regions, products, types of articles (like FAQs versus troubleshooting steps), or whatever works best for you. For example, you could create a data category group called US Regions, which includes the data categories West, Midwest, South, and Northeast. So when you write an article that lists the locations and hours of your stores on the west coast, you would select the West category. Then, a customer in Nevada can look in the West category to find the nearest location faster. You can create categories for your articles before or during the Help Center guided setup flow. Either way, we recommend planning out the categories you want ahead of time so you can set up everything faster. ## Share and Manage Featured Topics Your help center has tiles on the homepage that let your customers read articles within a particular category. We call these featured topics. You can set your featured topics when you use the Help Center setup flow. Creating New Topics During the Setup Flow If you don’t create your data categories before starting the flow, you can create topics. We do some heavy lifting behind-the-scenes to create data categories for them. When you’re ready to publish articles, simply assign them to the data categories we created, and they’ll appear in your help center. Selecting Data Categories During the Setup Flow When you’ve already created data categories and data category groups before starting the flow, you can select the ones you want to appear as featured topics. We create topics from those data categories to make them show up in your help center’s homepage tiles. Any articles that you publish (or have published) using those data categories appear in your help center. Managing Your Topics You can edit your featured topics in Experience Workspaces in Setup. From there, go to **Content Management** | **Topics** | **Featured Topics**. ## Add Branding to Your Help Center You can add a logo, login page background, page header, and featured topic tile images. You can also choose colors for different elements on your help center. To select colors and add a logo, login page background, and page header, use Experience Builder. See [Brand Your Community](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_customize_branding.htm&language=en_US) for more details. To add featured topic images, use Experience Workspaces. From there, go to **Content Management** | **Topics** | **Featured Topics**. #### See Also - [Set Up Help Center with a Guided Setup Flow](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=help_center_setup_flow.htm&language=en_US) - [Help Center Setup Flow Next Steps](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=help_center_setup_flow_whats_next.htm&language=en_US) - [Introduction to Help Center](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_help_center_intro.htm&language=en_US) - [Use Experience Builder](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=community_designer_customize_templates.htm&language=en_US) - [Manage Your Featured Topics](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_topics_featured.htm&language=en_US)