These help pages are just staic HTML pages, I can share a few thoughts:

1. Keep them simple, just static text and images if you can, dynamic scripting like javascript may complicate things

2. You don’t have to put images in the _layouts directory, you can actually put them in any document library which users have access. To build a proper help collection, embed the images in the acutal help collection, as an help item, refer to the tutorials provided on the blackcompass website

3. I noticed SharePoint developers tend to use SharePoint designer (free download) to author pages, you need html/css skills, for a more advanced tool, maybe visual studio?

My open question is what would you recommend as the best tool for actually authoring the content? Something that could be used for initial creation of content and on-going maintenance. Microsoft Word seems inadequate from an image URL perspective it really only does well with absolute URLs which is not something we would want. And I’m looking into Adobe Framemaker but that might be overkill.

As for images, it seems you can embed them as described in these articles or add them to the _layouts directory and they would be accessible which may be nice if you are using the same image multiple times. The main concern/question is what is best for a previewing and actual content authoring perspective.

Any thoughts would be appreciated?