SpringyCamp 2020: Migrating to LibGuides and LibCal

Some of the best practices that we adopted can be found in our Style Guide, below are some that we really like and some general ideas that may assist you in creating your library's LibGuides and LibCal.

Page Properties 

The page title should reflect what the page information is about and should not be too long in its naming. Each page should have the properties filled out so that the web crawl can index each page. Page description should be able to describe what the page is about when searching on a search engine.

Guide Thumbnail

One of the great things about LibGuide is that we can share our guides through social media. One of the best practices for any guide is to create a thumbnail for the guides.

Since there is no real "sandbox" area to test and develop guides, I came up with a naming convention that works for us at the library. Any new guides that are designed we place three (*) follow by DEV-. This pushes all these titles above others.

It is always best to resize any image used on a website. We have to keep our audiences in mind when adding anything to our library website—that why, among other reasons, images need to be size correctly for the web. I have added a site I use to resize our pictures for our library. 

Alert notices are a great way to get critical information out to your patron. The best way for us is to place these notices at the top of the page so that it is displayed across all pages.

One major lesson learned, create a placeholder alert and comment it out with <!-- --> so that you can re-use the alert again if needed.

A significant lesson learned in developing LibGuides and LibCal is that of CSS customization. We release LibCal first as a pilot for our summer reading program, which meant customizing LibCal was a top priority.

We found that have a master CSS file for both LibGuides and LibCal made sense, specifically the header, footers, body, paragraphs, and links. We also have a specific CSS file for LibCal related customization.

If you have more products like LibAnswes, LibWizard, etc. then it makes sense to have a specific CSS file for those as well but still has a master file for common customization mention before.