# Organizing Your Content

> Optional guidance and recommendations on how to organize your documentation site.

---

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/llms.txt)

---

If you have a look at our [Example Site](https://example.docsy.dev/about/),
you'll see that we've organized the Documentation section into a number of
subsections, each with some recommendations about what you might put in that
section.

## Do I need to use this structure?

Absolutely not! The site structure in the Example Site was created to meet the
needs of large docsets for large products with lots of features, potential
tasks, and reference elements. For a simpler docset (like this one!), it's fine
to just structure your docs around specific features that your users need to
know about. Even for larger documentation sets, you may find that the structure
isn't useful "as is", or that you don't need to use all the section types.

We do recommend that (as we've done here) you provide at least:

- An **Overview** of the product (either on the docs landing page or a separate
  Overview page) that tells the user why they should be interested in your
  project.
- A **Getting Started** page.
- Some **Examples**.

You may also want to create some tasks/how-tos for your project's features. Feel
free to copy this Docsy user guide site or even just the docs section instead if
you like this simpler structure better.

> [!TIP]
>
> If you want to copy this guide, be aware that its
> [source files](https://github.com/google/docsy/tree/main/docsy.dev) are
> _inside_ the Docsy theme repo, and so it doesn't have its own `themes/`
> directory: instead, we run `hugo server --themesDir ../..` to use Docsy from
> its parent directory. You may want to either copy the site and
> [add a `themes/` directory with Docsy](/docs/get-started/other-options/#option-2-clone-the-docsy-theme),
> or just copy the `docs/` folder into your existing site's content root.

[Learn more](/docs/content/adding-content/#organizing-your-documentation) about
how Hugo and Docsy use folders and other files to organize your site.

## Why this structure?

We based the Example Site structure on our own experiences creating (and using)
large documentation sets for different types of project and on user research
carried out on some of our bigger sites. In user studies we saw that users cared
most about and immediately looked for a Get Started or Getting Started section
(so they could, well, get started), and some examples to explore and copy, so we
made those into prominent top-level doc sections in our site. Users also wanted
to find "recipes" that they could easily look up to perform specific tasks and
put together to create their own applications or projects, so we suggest that
you add this kind of content as Tasks. Other content types such as conceptual
docs, reference docs, and end-to-end tutorials are less important for all doc
sets, particularly for smaller projects. We emphasize in our Example Site that
these sections are optional.

We hope to improve the Example Site structure further as we learn more about how
users interact with technical documentation, particularly for Open Source
projects.

## Writing style guide

This guide and the example site just address how to organize your documentation
content into pages and sections. For some guidance on how to organize and write
the content in each page, we recommend the
[Google Developer Documentation Style Guide](https://developers.google.com/style/),
particularly the
[Style Guide Highlights](https://developers.google.com/style/highlights).