This site helps Volvo owners because we have great tutorial/DIYs written by other owners. You don’t need an English degree to put out something that will benefit hundreds or thousands of other owners.
If you want, skip all the rest of this and get in touch with Matthew (Matt). Just stop reading and say hi, and then you can reply to my email and we’ll go from there.
Most tutorial/DIYs are forum posts (usually a New Topic). Other times they’re sent in to me as PDFs, Word documents or any number of other formats. They’re all ok.
We always give credit to you. We’re not in the business of pretending we wrote something we didn’t. There’s no point to that.
If it’s more than 4-5 paragraphs and has photos, you get your forum account pushed up to MVS Contributor status.
Content
Background Helps
Why did you make this repair? Preventative? Or was your Volvo undriveable unless you did it? This is background and it helps give context to your fellow Volvo owner on the reasons for the repair. Here’s an example of background info on a repair. This lives at the top of the writeup. See this Angle Gear Leak Fix – 5Cyl AWD Volvo 2001-2006.
More = Better
The more detailed the better, naturally. If you feel like extreme specifics aren’t helpful, don’t go there. Just use your best judgement.
Parts and Part Numbers
Part numbers are important so please add those if you have them. Where you got the parts is helpful.
Photos
There’s never been a tutorial/DIY written here that wasn’t made better because of photos. The reason is self-explanatory. If you didn’t take photos, don’t worry… there are hundreds or thousands of Volvo owners out there that will probably still benefit because you wrote what you did.
If your photos aren’t awesome, don’t worry, they’ll still help. I’ll help you make your photos look great.
Content Summary
The best tutorial/DIYs follow this pattern:
- title
- background
- tools used
- procedure
- summary or outcome
… with photos sprinkled in to illustrate what you did.
Format
The best way to do it is to be as simple as possible so flexibility becomes easy. That means the plainer the better… a text document. I’d suggest .txt but since you have photos let’s use the step up from there, .rtfd. That’s a Rich Text document format. Plain… but with formatting (bold etc) and images (that are stored inside it, like MS Word and PDFs, etc.).
You can save as .rtfd from any normal text editing app like Word, Google Documents etc.
Save heavy formatting for later days. It tends to get in the way early on. I’d do sentences, paragraphs, bolds and photos as you go along. Then when the content is set, format more intensively for photo captions, lists, headings, resizing photos, and so on.
When you keep things basic, your options stay open.