Introduction
Much has changed within the technical communication space within the past few years.
Until recently, API documentation was the only technical communication material available to developers who wanted to integrate with a software or system, regardless of where they were in their journey of discovery.
However, the audience of technical communication materials has grown beyond developers. Today almost every level of stakeholder is actively looking for software information. Project managers, software testers, marketing and salespeople also need to refer to technical documentation through various stages of their work. They want more than a single point of information – they want materials that are easily-digestible, and speak to them based on their needs and where they are in their journey with the software or system.
The concept of a Developer Portal was born as a way to address this increased demand for a more inclusive and expressive knowledge portal.
What is API Documentation?
Before we try to understand what a Developer Portal is, let’s quickly summarize what API documentation is.
API documentation is a manual which provides the details and how-tos of working with your API. It defines the working details of the API and includes the best ways to integrate an application to a platform.
It is the primary piece of technical communication developers use when working with APIs. Developers spend so much time (almost 10+ hours/week) referring to documentation and thereby working with the APIs.
Despite being an excellent resource for all developers – beginners and seasoned alike – API documentation has some limitations. Incompleteness, ambiguity, obsolescence, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies often plague the documentation. There is also a risk of fragmentation or tangled information on the presentation side, or it may become tedious where there are many APIs involved.
That’s where the Developer Portal comes in.
Goodbye API documentation, Hello Developer Portal!
For a long time, a Developer Portal meant API and SDK documentation thrown together in an online platform. That is still the case for many businesses; they think that a portal is where developers go find some information – that’s all!
But a Developer Portal is more than just API documentation. It is a hub of every piece of technical documentation, including APIs and SDKs.
A Developer Portal is a crucial developer relations (DevRel) tool that helps an organization provide the best possible experience to its APIs and software platform.
It’s also not just documentation for developers – it also serves as a self-service support hub, where users can find all the information they need when interacting with your software platform. A Developer Portal includes tutorials, how-to guides, API documentation and integration details, forums, and support hubs. In that sense, API documentation is only a subset of the Developer Portal.
Let’s take the example of HubSpot – their Developer Portal contains not just API documentation, but much more. In their portal, you can find:
- Quick start guides to the HubSpot CMS development
- A CMS developer sandbox account to test APIs on the backend
- The HubSpot CMS Developer Community Slack with 9,000+ HubSpot CMS developers and product team members
- The CMS Developer Forum
- Tutorials, how-to-guides, try-it-yourself code, templating languages, and other developer, marketing and sales references organized into various sections and subsections.
This shows a Developer Portal is not just a bunch of documents, but a self-supporting hub catering to all stakeholders involved, not just the developers!
Advantages of Choosing Developer Portals
By now, you might have known that a Developer Portal is an intermediary between API providers and API consumers. The sole purpose of a Developer Portal is to ensure that good communication exists between the stakeholders and the software product.
When a person is learning about new technology they often need help in their journey of discovery. In such cases, there is a clear benefit to having a designated place where you can learn, try, and discuss the technology. This lowers the learning curve, increasing the chances of retention, and results in higher trust in the technology.
The main advantage of a Developer Portal over simple API documentation is this trust.
Developer Portals help stakeholders feel at ease when navigating through available resources. It provides an interface where they can truly learn about a platform – all by themselves.
Even for non-developers such as product owners, marketers, technical writers, software testers and UI/UX designers, Developer Portals can serve as a powerful tool to learn about a technology or system.
A well-managed documentation site with a dedicated community of developers and forums for discussion, is what one needs to trust a platform. And that is what Developer Portal provides.
What Does a Developer Portal Contain?
A Developer Portal has various stakeholders, from developers to product owners to marketers to salespeople. The portal also caters to developer advocates, implementation managers, and support team members.
A Developer Portal contains the following types of documentation:
- API and SDK documents for starters and professionals
- “Try-It-Out” feature to test API calls in browser and view responses
- Tutorials, how-to guides, instructions, manuals, and videos
- API sandbox to test your APIs on the backend
- API Status Checker to verify status of all APIs
- Reference documents for troubleshooting and maintenance
- Case studies, use cases, user stories, blog posts
- FAQs, educational content, community forums, contact pages
In short, a Developer Portal is an all-encompassing tool that not only serves the developers but also everyone involved (both internal and external stakeholders) – helping them on their journey to perform their tasks more efficiently and effectively.
Types of Developer Portals
Today, you can find several types of Developer Portals. Portals may have no login requirements, or they may require login, or have login requirements along with restricted access of differing levels of privileges.
Generally, Developer Portals can be divided into three categories.
- Public Portals: share all its information publicly.
- API Catalog Portals: talk in great depths about many APIs and their use.
- Personalized Portals: let each user select their own journey and show information based on their journey.
How to Create Your Own Developer Portal?
To create your own Developer Portal you can use several different out-of-the-box platforms, such as Readme, Haxor, or Apigee Edge.
For example, you can use Haxor’s api-gateway-developer-portal to create your own serverless Developer Portal to list all of your APIs in a catalog form. It’s easy to ship and deploy since it uses the serverless application model.
Similarly, with the Apigee API Developer Portal, you can publish your catalog of API products, offer detailed documentation, and create a smooth onboarding process. You can also create an app and API key – and even customize the portal by leveraging the available templates and styling.
Both Haxor and Apigee offer an easy-to-use and customizable dashboard for its users. Developers can easily upload an API document, edit the content in HTML formatting, and publish the content. When consumer developers log in to the portal, they can see all APIs in a list format – and execute a call to try it out.
In addition to using a third-party tool, you can also custom build a Developer Portal by using your internal development teams – along with existing backend and frontend technologies used in your company. This will obviously take more time and company resources, but you will retain full control over the development aspects and not merely rely on someone else to care for your business and development needs.
What Makes a Great Developer Portal?
A Developer Portal, with a strong presence in the community, is a key factor behind the success of a Developer Portal. A good Developer Portal does 3 things when it comes to communication:
- Clearly describes the API features and how to use them
- Demonstrates easy and clean steps to get started with each API
- Actively participates in solving the problems faced by the users
In addition to that, every great Developer Portal has a great team behind it. A team of experienced technical writers and developers produces information that is accurate, consistent, and valuable.
Next comes organization! When you’re pushing out hundreds of thousands of APIs in an unorganized platform, it can become overwhelming. Having a simple, yet pleasing user experience is crucial to delivering an engaging and interactive platform.
You will also need to build a forum where developers, project managers and software testers can meet and discuss the use of APIs. For instance, they can do this on GitHub or Slack – or sometimes on self-built forums.
Similarly, the onboarding process must be swift. Offering how-to guides and tutorials during the onboarding process is critical. You can also provide the users with code samples and helper libraries in popular programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java, etc. The mock-ups and try-it-out resources will directly address developer pain points – this will also do all the heavy lifting of the onboarding process.
Final Thoughts
A robust Developer Portal assists your company in communicating, enabling, and centralizing information in a single channel. With an effective and efficiently curated Developer Portal, you have an opportunity to streamline the information available to your consumers – making it more straightforward for them to adopt your software.
There is no doubt that a well-built Developer Portal can help your API build trust, one of the most crucial assets for a business in this age, and in a time where new technology and systems sprout every day. We believe choosing a Developer Portal over traditional API documentation gives you that edge and puts you ahead of the race.
Looking for assistance with your developer portal? Reach out to ThatAPICompany for a consultation.
