There are a lot of good tutorial websites that lay out those step-by-step instructions in a pretty brilliant fashion. Thanks to HTML5 and all those cool JavaScript goodies, you can have plenty of flexibility if your creative gears are spinning. But with the aid of third-party software, you can even go further than that. Here are some other tricks worth trying out if you want those tutorials to attract even more attention.
Screenshots with Style
Any operating system comes with a feature to take a screenshot of your desktop. But with the aid of third-party software, you can take better screenshots and add to some extra flair resulting to a highly comprehensive tutorial. You can try a freeware app like JShot for OS X/Linux if you want to easily capture a portion of the screen and make some basic edits or you can really make the screenshots look professionally edited with Snagit. ScreenSteps is perhaps the most interesting tool because it fully guides you through the creation of an entire tutorial page through the use of multiple screenshots.
Hand-holding Videos
If a series of screenshots isn’t enough to tell the full story, you can go as far as recording your actions on the desktop and save it as a video so any visitor can understand. Rather than reading a possibly lengthy page, all the visitor has to do is play the video and optionally make it full screen so they can really pay attention to the step-by-step process. Camtasia:mac provides all the necessary tools in creating a nice tutorial video. Unfortunately, there is no Linux version but at least recordMyDesktop does the job and costs nothing.
Video is required for a good tutorial. My Screen Recorder is a better screen recording software. It records your screen and audio from the speakers or your voice from the microphone – or both simultaneously. The recordings are clear and look great when played back on your PC or uploaded to YouTube. It will record directly to standard compressed format that works with any video editor or any tool, no conversion required.
http://www.deskshare.com/screen-recorder.aspx