Overview
Designed, built, and launched a centralized documentation and self-service knowledgebase platform, addressing onboarding friction and fragmented knowledge across a growing, distributed organization. Evaluated traditional SaaS options (Confluence, GitBook) and chose a lean architecture that scales cleanly across hundreds of employees without per-seat cost pressure.
The platform is built on Jekyll with the Chirpy theme. Jekyll is a Ruby-based static site generator with a mature ecosystem of documentation-focused themes and tooling. Unlike Astro, which is a general-purpose framework optimized for building custom sites and applications, Jekyll and Chirpy are purpose-built for content-heavy documentation sites. Chirpy provides built-in left-sidebar navigation, per-page table of contents, category and tag hierarchies, and full-text search out of the box. For a knowledge base where the goal is structured browsability and fast content discovery rather than custom UI components, this is the right tradeoff.
What Was Done
- Selected Jekyll with the Chirpy theme as the foundation, prioritizing documentation-native features (sidebar nav, TOC, categories, tags, search) over a custom build
- Hosted on Azure Static Web Apps, which provides global CDN distribution, free SSL, and native integration with Microsoft Entra ID for authentication, keeping infrastructure cost at roughly $9/month
- Integrated Microsoft Entra ID SSO so all content stays private and employees authenticate with their existing work accounts, with no separate login or user management required
- Configured GitHub Actions for CI/CD, so any push to main triggers a Jekyll build and deploys automatically to Azure Static Web Apps with no manual steps
- Organized and migrated critical documentation from scattered sources into a structured, searchable, and easily accessible system
- Built self-service resources for common IT requests to reduce ticket volume
- Established governance standards for content ownership and maintenance
Outcome
Delivered an enterprise-grade documentation experience at roughly $9/month compared to thousands in per-seat SaaS licensing, while scaling onboarding efficiency, reducing dependency on IT for routine information requests, and creating a foundation for ongoing documentation standards across the organization.
Stack
Jekyll · Chirpy · Azure Static Web Apps · Microsoft Entra ID · GitHub Actions · Markdown