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Don't Repeat Yourself

As you're planning your guide, keep in mind the notion that it's best to have only one "source of truth" that you update. That way, you never have to worry about "link sprawl"--if you've updated your "source of truth," you know that you're all set!

There are a few ways to think about this, detailed in the boxes below!

You'll notice a few things about this page. First, that it's only a two-column layout. This is LibGuides' default setting, and is therefore most responsive to changes in screen size.

~20% of our traffic comes from mobile devices — Enough that we should plan to accommodate!

There are lots of ways to think about responsive design, but for now one of the best things we can do is think carefully about how much content we have on our guides--do you need all of those tabs/pages, or can you condense?

In the left column, you should have your navigation links, and the profile box directly under that. The right column is going to be your primary real estate, and the most important boxes should be near the top.

You may want to include a welcome box that contains some information about the guide, or provides more information about the scope of the resources within.

You may want to make a list of 1-3 resources to highlight. If someone were to ONLY look at the first page of your libguide, what would you want them to know about accessing? Keep it simple and short. Think about what you want immediately visible to your audience without scrolling. 

At the Guides level, you could create a single "Master [Subject] Guide" as your source of truth. For example, you could put all social science content into one (unpublished/private) guide; it would become unwieldy for users quickly, but that's ok--they wouldn't see it! On your Social Sciences guide, you could then have a page devoted to all things Education.

Later, when you wanted to establish an Education subject guide for the public, you could fill it with mapped copies of the boxes from the education page of the Social Sciences guide. The "architecture" of the guides (where you place the boxes, what pages you have) wouldn't have to be identical, but as long as you're mapping all that content back to the "source of truth" it will be incredibly easy to maintain.

The single easiest way to avoid broken links in your guides is to use a mapped link. If you're sharing a database or other resource from the A-Z list on your guide, "map" (don't "copy")  from the A-Z list in the asset guide.