Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

FAQ's are a poor version of 'context sensitive help', the context is usually a lot better known than the 'FAQ' link would have you believe. Over the years we've collected the questions our users have really asked and we really answered them, that's the basis of our FAQ, and it is being used (even by users from off-site that come in through google).

If I would do it again, I'd use a simple 'help' (or ?) button in most places to link directly to the relevant FAQ entry.

If your website is very technical in nature (and some are), I don't think there is a way around the FAQ, the people that use their FAQ for stupid marketing speak ought to be shot for misleading the public and devaluing a genuinely useful construct.

It seems that with the increase of time the probability of any surface turning into a bill board approaches '1'.

Unfortunately FAQs seem to be subject to this law.

I guess part of my complaint is also this: People often put a bunch of answers to questions out there that no one asked, usually because the site isn't self explanatory, if people are really asking you questions, you have a great opportunity to fix your site, not make a list of fixes to the stuff that is broken on your site.

But not all questions in a FAQ have to be 'about the site'. For instance, we have an enormous section on how to get various pieces of hardware to work with our software.

Basically the FAQ is our first line of 'defense' in the support process, we hope that the FAQ will help the user, if that isn't the case a 'real live person' (tm) will take care of the request.

Other things about billing and account issues and so on have found their spot there. It saves us tons of support questions and that really helps to keep us productive. If a question was never answered before it goes in to the FAQ in the appropriate section.

So, really we should probably call it 'QTALSAO' but that's a bit non-standard :)

Your visitors might not actually ask you the questions, but you can bet that anyone visiting your site for the first time is at least asking themselves similar questions in their head: What is this? Why should I care? Who built it? How much does it cost?

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