LibGuide Design: Best Practices and Guidelines

This guide is designed to provide guidance on making LibGuides more useful, accessible, and relevant to users through best practices that incorporate usability and web design.

Some of the new resources and services that Library Liaisons might want to share with faculty are:

• Guide is assigned a “subject”
• Account profile is updated with contact information and a photo/avatar
• Profile box is added to the guide home page
• Guide has been viewed on multiple devices to check responsiveness 
• All pages have friendly URLs 
• All links work, link text should be descriptive
• All images have alternative text descriptions
• Review time limited content/pages (hours, semester specific classes) 

1. Start on LibGuides Home and sign in.
2. In LibGuides Shortcuts box, select Create Guide
3. On Create New Guide page, in Choose Layout or Reuse dropdown menu, select "Copy content/ layout from an existing guide". 
   1. Choose Local Guides (your guides & your colleagues' guides).
   2. In drop down menu for Select a guide..., type in search term "LibGuide Design".
   3. Select the guide: LibGuide Design: Best Practices and Guidelines by Matthew Daley
4. Fill out Guide Name & Description and select a Guide Type. 
5. Select Create Guide.

Editing pages in a guide

If you are reusing the LibGuide Design: Best Practices and Guidelines LibGuide when creating your guide, please review Springshare documentation on Adding, Reusing, or Editing pages in a guide.