A practical guide to designing better documentation sites

Most teams spend a lot of time on the words in their documentation, and not much time on everything else. But how a docs site is structured and styled has a real effect on whether readers trust it, find what they’re looking for, and come back.

After helping to design a lot of docs sites — including our own product docs and a demo site for our sales team — here are five things that consistently make the biggest difference.

1. Focus on information architecture before anything else

It’s tempting to open the customization panel first. Resist that temptation.

The most important decisions you’ll make about a docs site are structural ones — and the most fundamental question is: what’s the organizing principle? Most docs sites are built around one of three models:

• Product-oriented – Content is split by product area or feature set. This works well when different parts of the product are used independently.

• Persona-oriented – Content is split by who’s reading — developers vs. end users, admins vs. contributors etc. This works well when different audiences need genuinely different information.

• Use case-oriented – Content is organized around what readers are trying to do. This works well for products with clear workflows or jobs to be done.

None of these is universally right, and the wrong choice leads to navigation that feels confusing to readers and is painful to reorganize later. That’s why getting it right early will help everything else — theming, content layout, landing pages — fall into place naturally.

If you’re migrating from an existing site, treat it as an opportunity. Map out the current structure, figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and make intentional decisions before you import anything.

2. Pick your theme first, then customize from there

GitBook’s themes — Clean, Muted, Bold, and Gradient — do more than change how the header looks. They affect the whole site, including backgrounds, sidebar contrast, icon colors, borders. The theme is the foundation for your overall design.

A lot of customization frustration comes from fighting a theme that wasn’t the right starting point. Spend a few minutes deciding which theme is closest to your brand’s feel before touching anything else.

3. Use your existing sites as a reference (and your browser inspector as a tool)

You don’t need a brand guide to get precise colors and fonts right. Your marketing site, existing docs, and product UI are all worth looking at — compare them and use whichever feels most current. Visual identities evolve, and different surfaces update at different rates.

Once you’ve identified the right reference, open it in your browser inspector to pull exact hex colors and font names directly from the CSS. Right-click any element, open the inspector, and look for font-family values and hex color codes.

This is especially useful when setting your primary color in GitBook: paste in the exact value from your reference site, and the generated color palette will feel right immediately.

4. Build landing pages last

Landing pages — the full-width, sidebar-free pages designed to orient readers, like this one — work best as a reflection of what the site contains. If you build them first, you end up revising them every time the underlying content changes.

Build your spaces, fill in your content, get the navigation working — then add landing pages on top. At that point you know exactly what needs to be surfaced, what the most common entry points are, and what links should be prominent.

When you come to build them? A search bar with suggested queries, cards for navigating to major sections, and a clear primary CTA covers most of what a landing page needs. Keep it focused on orientation, not content.

5. Reuse a small set of blocks

GitBook offers a lot of blocks. Most great docs sites use a small subset of them, consistently.

For content pages — which make up the bulk of most docs sites — hint blocks, tables, columns, and code blocks cover almost everything you’ll need. Hints are especially versatile: use them to call out warnings, tips, or important notes without breaking the reading flow. For landing pages, cards paired with a search bar handle most navigation needs.

Resist the urge to reach for something different on every page. Consistency reads as polish, and a small component vocabulary is faster to build with, easier to hand off, and simpler to maintain as your docs grow.

These high-level tips should give you a good understanding of how to approach customization in your docs. If you want more hands-on steps to guide you through the customization process, check out our guides.

→ Read our step-by-step customization guides

→ 7 ways teams are using GitBook Agent to streamline their docs workflows

→ How to optimize your documentation for AI (without breaking it for humans)