Skip to Main Content
Addlestone Library is open to the College of Charleston community and affiliates via card access. Visitors may access Addlestone Library Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm, and must present a government issued ID and sign in upon entry.

CofC LibApps Best Practices: Guide Design and Appearance

Guidelines for keeping LibGuides, LibCal, and LibAnswers content fresh.

Overall Appearance

  • Aim for consistency in your guides. This includes fonts and sizes used, headings, and links.
  • Keep color options for boxes, box headings, etc.to the default colors so that there is a consistent look & feel across all CofC Libraries LibGuides.
  • Don't use tabs to create a redirect to another guide or page.
  • Put the link in the body of a page so that the tabs behave consistently across the guide. This is a good use for bootstrap cards. Maintain the heading hierarchy by using h3 headings within boxes. Box titles are h2.
  • Use sentence case for guide titles, page titles, box titles, headings, and subheadings.
  • Paste text from Word by selecting the paste from Word icon,  Word has hidden formatting that you want to remove before adding the content to LibGuides.
  • Don't create formatting that needs special coding before emailing scronceg@cofc.edu. Accessibility compliance must be checked before proceeding with any non-standard options.

Design for Mobile

The organization of your guide should be clear to a reader. Place the most important content in the top left box. This is not how CofC LibGuides have traditionally been designed, so consider adjusting your guides, if needed. 

More and more students are looking at website content on mobile devices or in small windows on their laptops. LibGuides is mobile-friendly, in that boxes automatically resize and rearrange to adjust to a mobile layout. However, LibGuides rearranges by column--first, it will display everything in column 1 from top to bottom, then column 2, then column 3. If you place "extras" in column 1, those are what your mobile reader will see first, above any more important content in the middle column.

Formatting Text

Headings

Use heading styles to organize information hierarchically on a page. Find these in the dropdown menu that shows "Normal."

LibGuides page headings are Heading 1 (H1) and box headings are H2, so those are not available to maintain proper heading hierarchy.

Do NOT skip headings--in other words, do not apply H4 if you have not applied H3. This creates problems for patrons using screen readers. You can adjust the font size to make a heading appear smaller, if needed.

Font Style

Avoid using fonts other than the default style. When pasting text, use the Strip Format icon on the toolbar to remove formatting and styles applied by the program you are pasting from. 

Using LibGuides Content

LibGuides makes it very easy to reuse guides, pages, boxes, and content to save you time and work in creating and maintaining your guides. You can reuse an entire guide by selecting it as a template when creating a new one, or you can reuse individual pages and boxes, and assets including links, databases, media/widgets, documents, books from the catalog and more.

When reusing content, you can either map to the original item, or copy it. If you map to a page or box, you can:

  • Change the page or box title.

For more editing options, you can copy an item and:

  • Change the page title and add, delete, or reorder boxes on the page.

  • Change the box title and add, delete, or edit content within the box.

When reusing content, keep in mind that Mapping/Linking is better than Copying because it's easier to maintain consistency and currency of your guide content. It is suggested that you:

  • Go to the Assets library (Content>Assets) to review and manage content assets in all of your guides, including: links, RSS feeds, documents, books, media/widget...etc.
  • Deduplicate Assets: Type your name in the Owner column to sort and find all the assets owned (created) by you. If you found duplicate assets:
    • Find the duplicate(s) and click on the number in the Guide Count column.
    • Click on the guide title to go to the guide.
    • Remove the duplicate asset from the guide.
    • Add the correct asset by reusing the existing links or other asset to the guide.
    • Go back to the assets page and repeat this process until the Guide Count of the duplicate asset(s) is at 0.
    • Delete the duplicate asset(s) from the assets page.

Using Bootstrap in LibGuides

LibGuides is built upon Bootstrap, a framework of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Librarians can increase the usability and functionality of their guides with Bootstrap’s components without the need of extensive web development experience.

Visit the Common Bootstrap Cards page of this guide to view customized boot strap options. 

Credit

Credit: This page is a derivative of the Writing for the Web page of SeattleU, Reusing Content page at Illinois Library,  and Guide Maintenance page at Purdue University.