Getting started

Introduction

What DocSteer is, who it is for, and how it is put together.

Updated Sep 1, 2026 Edit this page

DocSteer is a Jekyll theme for technical documentation, support portals and internal knowledge bases. It is built to be fast, accessible and easy to customise without touching the internals.

Highlights

  • Six colour skinsaqua, violet, mint, ember, graphite, clay — each with light and dark variants.
  • Live search — a prebuilt JSON index and a keyboard-friendly modal (/ or K). No external library.
  • Image lightbox — click any content image to zoom, with galleries and captions.
  • Auto table of contents with scroll-spy, generated from your headings.
  • SEO readyjekyll-seo-tag, sitemap, RSS feed, Open Graph, JSON-LD.
  • Zero framework — a few kB of vanilla JS, compressed CSS, deferred scripts.

Note: DocSteer works both as a cloned starter repo and as a published theme gem. Most users just fork the repo — see Installation.

How it is organised

Folder What lives there
_layouts/ default, home, doc, page
_includes/ Header, sidebar, footer, search modal, TOC — small and overridable
_sass/docsteer/ One partial per concern; all colours in _skins.scss
assets/js/ main.js, search.js, lightbox.js — independent, dependency-free
_data/navigation.yml Top nav + grouped sidebar
_docs/ This documentation, as a Jekyll collection

Next steps

  1. Install and run it locally
  2. Configure the theme
  3. Pick a colour skin
  4. Wire up your navigation