I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. We’re considering setting up a knowledge base as a nice way to consolidate our ‘help’ resources like articles and videos. Currently they’re in a few places (per the Resources menu item above).
There is currently a wiki, although it’s been neglected lately. Rather than working to improve the wiki, we’re thinking of moving the current wiki content, plus other help resources, into a knowledge base.
As part of this we will invite some of the most active and longstanding forum members (thank you again for all of your participation!) as admins in the knowledge base, to help us create and edit content.
One benefit of a knowledge base is that, unlike a wiki, it won’t require users to create another username and password (because the wiki is a separate application from the forum and website). It’ll allow us the ability to post authoritative answers to FAQs, etc. Then, if users have questions or answers about the content, it’s as easy as referencing the knowledge base article, within a new forum topic.
Another benefit of a knowledge base is ‘unified’ search and search results. Meaning, across the various ways we provide help content, it’ll all be indexed in one place, which should make it easier to find (and publish) the help content.
As for the current wiki, there’s some great content in there, so I just want to be clear that we’ll keep that content, we just want to serve it up better. The wiki is now out-of-date in several ways, so we need to do something. As you can tell, I’m in favor of a knowledge base, but it’s your voices that matter - the voice of the customer!
I’m excited to hear everyone’s feedback. I think Chris makes some great points about consolidating resources into a place that’s easy to maintain and that resides within the main platform instead of on such an old legacy platform.
I think it’s a great idea. Having a one stop shop for the official WE answer to common inquiries would be very useful when answering questions for new users (and myself).
I think it’s very useful and I’d love to participate. Unfortunately, right now I’m very busy at work. As sooon as I have some time again, I’ll participate if that is still useful.
Will do, I’ll put an outline of the knowledge base organization here, once I get it ready. I want to try it out first, migrating the wiki content and some videos into a demo site, to see the best way to categorize the content.
I’ve actually had thoughts of a similar nature - but I limited my thoughts to how you’d make it work in the Wiki format. One idea I had was including under a subject line links to “blog” entries, written by users. Where would the blogs reside? Could they be updated by the original poster? Of course, WE would have free access to such content for their business purposes (after all, it’s their web site!).
There exists a blog on the WE already, Tom . OK, I must admit it’s not on the WE site, written by me only and not particularly directed at beginners (https://moleculepolishing.wordpress.com/). Fortunately, I also contributed to the Wiki .
One idea I have is that it might be possible that if we set up a new knowledge base, to mix the contents of the current Wiki with some other information currently under “Resources”, particularly things like “how to find your angle” and some of the documents written by Clay (?) with very nice graphics. Finally, when I tried out the resources today, it occurred to me that quite a few resources have broken links, e.g. for “Cutting Costs: How Sharp Knives Can Save Your Business Money”:
This site can’t be reached
The web page at https://wickededgeusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/CuttingCosts.pdf?_ga=2.121884427.1247008771.1497518099-1911156755.1478059933 might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
I will probably have some time to contribute to the new knowledge base, but only in a few weeks.
My .02… I think a KB should have more of a tie-in with the W.E. staff. For example, one of the platforms you listed (they all may do it, but one highlighted it)… was the ability to send a Customer Service response to the KB, where it could be formatted and added. I’m sure there’s a wealth of information from them that never make it to the forum… (and that they probably have to repeat over and over again).
I’ve also mentioned before that some of the information that could be obtained, for example, at the knife shows W.E. does every year, goes untapped. Maybe, with the creation of a KB… an effort could be made to document some of this? (That video I recently posted for example, of Kyle sharpening “a challenge” knife, is a good example). And if you look at some of the posts Kyle has made here in the forum (just using him as an example), a lot have info that he’s learned just from the volume of knives he’s sharpened,… and it’s a source that could probably be put to better use. A KB might be the ideal platform to get this included.
Might be something you’re already thinking of… but if not, I think it’s an important resource that should be added.
Very good point, Curtis. The only thing we have to make sure before is that we think up a proper structure for the knowledge base, so that in advanced unexpected contributions (like Kyle’s video, which was very good and definitely deserves a place) do fit in properly.
Thanks for the discussion, it’s very helpful. There’s definitely a Venn diagram of overlapping resources, and that can make it tough to think of the proper home for each category of item. In the interest of usability, the first cut (get it?) I’ll make in the resources is that we should really only have one resource where there’s user posts / comments / replies, and that’s in the forum. That way, all a user’s input and reputation is consolidated into a single identity. That’s the challenge with a wiki, is that it would be somewhat redundant resource to the forum (each user would need a login and avatar, and there’s a need to manage user permissions, etc.). So, that’s my thought in favor of keeping the forum as the only resource for peer-peer discussions like this.
Then, the knowledge base serves as a straightforward source of definitive info published by Wicked Edge (with significant input from ‘power users’ who receive a login to help with the KB).
Then there’s probably still a bit of a gap, as to where blog-type info should go. I think that we should look into creating a blog, and then copying the appropriate blog entries into the knowledge base so they’ll show up in search results. And then for any discussion to be had on a blog post, someone can just create a forum topic, link to the blog post or KB article, and discuss it and/or talk about how to improve it.
If anyone has one or more examples of something similar, that’d also be helpful, I think.I recall
I recall similar information-websites (on other subjects) with a very good structure, but that looked very good and modern too. Only I cannot find them back. Even though we as power users may think looks are maybe a bit less important (see the current Wiki), I think that good looks will attract much more users. I think this is one of the reasons the current Wiki is not visited so well.
Looks great! KB will be awesome source of information. I would never imagine how deep this rabbit hole of sharpening will be. Thank you for doing great job!
I just wanted to let you know I think the new site structure is a huge improvement: it is much more accessible and overseeable.
A few possible improvements I noted:
If you go to www.wickededgeuse.com (where most people, particularly newcomers, will start) the forum is hidden in one of the submenus, whereas it is a separate entry at the top level in knife.wickededgeusa.com. It is my experience that sites with a clearly visible link to the forum on the main page come over more professionally (it shows interaction with the users is taken very seriously). So personally I would also add the top-level link to the forum on www.wickededgeuse.com. This may also help in improving forum traffic, which has been very low for the past time.
The link to find dealers on www.wickededgeuse.com is not working. I get an error message provided by the software that should help in finding dealers.
Cris, I'm willing to help as you asked me by PM. I have little time right know, but I hope to be able to help this weekend or maybe a little later.
My name is Chris, and I’ve been helping Clay and Wicked Edge with some marketing and web development work for the past couple years. The ‘Developer’ profile has actually been a shared profile across of few people working on the forum, but it seems like I’m the one using it the most, so I’m going to claim it with my name! I love Wicked Edge (the team, and the products). I’m not actually a developer, although I like to dabble with it just so I know how things work with software and the internet; but most changes are made by real web developers on our team. I have a WE100 and have pre-ordered the GO - can’t wait to get my hands on it!
For the menu, we're working to get it right. I think you're right that we should have a permanent top-level link to the forum; we'll work on the best overall layout and then get it up there (caveat: I don't make the design decisions, I just help the W.E. team with suggestions and then implementation).
For the Find a Dealer link, can you let me know the error message you're seeing? I'm not seeing any errors on it, but that doesn't mean there aren't any!
Hi Chris (and Clay, if you’re making the design decisions, and Chris’ team),
You’re doing great work; as I already wrote: I love the new structure of the website and I also think it’s very effective from a marketing point of view.
The link to Find a Dealer is working now. Maybe you were working on it when I tested it which caused the error?
Obviously I don’t know the all of the shops, however I do know the shops in the country I live in (The Netherlands). One is great (one of the best knife shops in Western Europe that has a very good assortment and great customer service - Knives And Tools) and carries many WE articles. However, the other three don’t even seem to carry WE articles. One (Rotterdam knives) did carry it in the past, but seemingly not anymore. I didn’t even know the other two shops existed (and I do know most knife-related shops in The Netherlands). Of these two shops one has a link that is not working anymore (DB Schietsport) and the other one (Multitools) has a website where it’s very difficult to log in. I managed to log in once and then it seemed it doesn’t seem to carry any WE articles.
Obviously this is not an issue for you, Chris, but for Clay, and I’ll send him a PM.
. OK, I must admit it’s not on the WE site, written by me only and not particularly directed at beginners (
