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Research Guides: Best Practices

This guide will help you create a usable, readable and well designed guide. It lists standards, best practices, and guidelines to follow when creating and updating guides.

Editing Process

Guide Publishing Process:

  • Only publish pages that are complete
  • Hide pages that are in-process until complete
  • Ask at least one other person to give you feedback on the guide
  • Review the Publishing Checklist before going live

 

Publishing Checklist

Before publishing your guide, please review the following checklist against your guide.

           This guide has been checked for:
  Fonts, colors and styles are standard (link)
All boxes, pages and guide titles follow proper naming convention (link)
Content adheres to editorial guidelines (link)
Every page has a Friendly URL (link)
Subpages are kept to a minimum (link)
Librarian profile box is placed in the left column, below the side-navigation menu of the home page (link)
No more than two columns used per page (link)
Guide has been viewed on multiple devices to check responsiveness (link)
Database and links have descriptions that are displayed below the link title (link)
All images have alt-text descriptions (link)
Text that was copied-and-pasted into the guide was cleared of nonstandard styling (link)
Lists of links are kept short (link)
Resources are ordered by relevance (link)
Boxes are ordered and placed based on responsive design         principles (link)
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