Help center article navigation

Navigation is how visitors move through your help center: jumping between sibling articles, scanning short labels in a sidebar, and browsing categories from the home page. Deskwoot gives you three controls for this, all under Help Center, then the Settings tab (the nav label is per article and lives in the article editor). Good navigation keeps people reading instead of bouncing back to chat.

What is the "In this category" sidebar?

Turn on the article sidebar and every article page gains a left column that lists the other articles in the same category. It's the docs-style layout you see on most software documentation sites: the article you're reading is highlighted, and one click takes the visitor to a sibling article without going back to the category page.

Why use it:

• It adds internal links between related articles, which helps visitors and helps SEO.
• It works no matter how long the article is, so a short article still shows the full category context.
• It turns a category into something people read through in order, like a guide.

With the sidebar off, article pages render as a single centered column with no sibling list. That's the right choice for a help center with very short categories or standalone articles. The sidebar is a portal-wide setting, so it's on or off for the whole help center, not per article.

How do I set a short nav label for an article?

Long article titles look great as a page heading but get clumsy in a narrow sidebar. That's what the nav title field in the article editor is for. Set a short label, for example "Refunds" for an article titled "How to request a refund and what to expect", and the sidebar and breadcrumb use the short version while the page heading and the SEO title keep the full title.

A few things to know:

• If you leave the nav title empty, the sidebar just falls back to the full article title. So you only need to set it where the full title is too long.
• The full title is always what shows as the page H1 and in search results. The nav title never changes those.
• If you translate articles, each language can have its own nav label, so the sidebar reads naturally in every locale you publish.

What is the category card layout?

The category card layout controls how categories appear on the help center home page. You have two options:

• Inline list (the default): each category is a box with a few of its articles listed right underneath. Visitors see article titles immediately on the home page. This is good when you have a handful of categories and want articles surfaced fast.
• Category cards: a grid of hub cards, one per category, each showing an icon, the category name, a guide count, and a description. Clicking a card opens that category's own page with its full article list. This scales better when you have many categories, because the home page stays clean and visitors drill in by topic.

Switch between them with the category card layout toggle in settings. If you use cards, give each category an icon and a short description so the grid looks finished. You set the icon from a curated set when you edit the category.

Putting it together

For a help center with a few short categories, the inline list plus the sidebar off is simple and works well. For a larger knowledge base, turn on category cards so the home page stays tidy, turn on the article sidebar so each category reads like a guide, and add short nav labels wherever the full title is too long for the sidebar. Categories themselves and their order are managed in the Categories settings.

All three of these settings are part of the same design panel, so changes show in the dashboard preview before you publish, and the design history lets you roll back if a layout doesn't land the way you expected.