How To Write a Great How-To Guide!

So you want to learn to write a great how-to guide. Well, buddy, you’re in luck. This here’ll show you how it’s done.

1. Click on "Modding How-Tos" in your top nav bar. Or just go to http://www.modshop.net/guides.


2. Click the "Add a New ‘How To’ Guide" button at the bottom of the list.


3. This should take you to a page that looks something like the first image.


4. Enter your Title, Summary, and Body. These are pretty self-explanatory. Hold off on adding images and videos, though; we’ll do that in the next step. Use page breaks if your How To is longer than a few hundred words. There’s a page-break button in the rich-text editor, or use <!—pagebreak—>.


5. Make your How-To as neat and easy-to-understand as possible. It’s okay to import a how-to you’ve written for another site, but please please clean it up a bit and make it look nice for our system.


6. Hit the Preview button to preview your work, and Submit it if you think you’ve done well. You’ll notice an edit guide text button below your byline. This does exactly what you think it does.


7. Now we’re going to add images. Click create new how-to image where it appears below the guide text. Create a title for your image, and upload one from your computer. To avoid breaking the table, images should be 419px wide or smaller. Also, if you refer to images by number or letter, be sure to add them in an image-editing program before you upload. Hit Submit. Repeat as necessary.


8. For videos, same idea. Click create new how-to video and input a title and the url of the video. This should be the page url, not the embed code. See example video on right.


9. To edit videos and images, click the appropriate button in the right-hand column.


10. Once you’ve submitted your how-to, it needs to be approved by a moderator. Usually that’s me. Have patience. Feel free to ping me if it’s not up within a day or so.

That’s about it! Have fun and let me know if you have any questions. Go to it!