Best Practices for Creating Guides in LibGuides2: Home

Each page of this guide highlights the new features of LibGuides2:

• Anatomy of the LibGuides Dashboard - Points out the LibGuides dashboard, showing you how to navigate it. 
• Layout: Guide Navigation - Talks about the new guide navigation features, such as sidebar versus tab navigation, adding next and previous buttons to your pages, etc. 
• Layout: Boxes and Columns - Boxes and columns are nothing new, but they sure have changed.  The third page talks about boxes and columns and how they have changed in the new platform. 
• Images in LibGuides2 - Again, we've always had images, but there are a lot of new features here, including the all new Image Manager
• Other Content in LibGuides2 - One of the major changes in LG2 is the Asset Manager and the differences between Links and Databases.  This page highlights those changes and also the other content available for LG2.
• Publishing - Talks about last steps before publishing and how to hide content in published guides

For more of a walk-through of creating guides in this new platform, you might like the handout I created.

General Best Practices:

Throughout this guide, there will be some best practices described for specific guide features.  But in general, the following principles should be followed:

• Avoid wordiness - remember that a LibGuide is in effect a web page, and people tend to dislike overly wordy websites.  Bulleted lists are preferred to lengthy paragraphs.
• Add images - along similar lines, people prefer web pages where text is broken up by images; screen shots, etc. can go a long way in enhancing the appeal of your guide.