Before publishing a new guide or after making significant changes to your guide, contact WebSIT team for approval.
Layout:
- Place content in order of importance. Put most important content toward the top. Displaying order on mobile devices is left to right and top to bottom.
- Use maximum of 6 pages per guide.
- Put your profile box in the left column under the page index. Place it only on the first page.
Content:
- Do not duplicate website content.
- Reuse content as much as possible.
- To find out all reusable boxes, go to "*Reusable Content for Harrell Guides" guide.
- To check the master list of assets, go to Content => Assets and then filter by owner “Master, Web”.
- Follow naming conventions
- Assign appropriate Subject Type when creating a guide.
- Assign appropriate subject(s) to your guide to make it discoverable via subject search. Contact web team for creating new subjects.
- Assign appropriate tags to your guide.
- Write a description for your guide.
- Give each guide a friendly URL.
- Write for the Web:
- Consider adding a guide description for non-departmental guides.
- Label pages with "Selected Journals ..." or "Selected Books ..." to indicate that we have more.
Format:
- Use standard formats when adding hyperlinks for library resources. Test links by clicking on each one of them instead of simply running Link Checker. Reuse links from the master list if available.
- For links taking the user away from the library website, use 'new window'.
- Description: use a short, targeted description of the link, unless it is very obvious what the link is. 4-10 words.
- More Info: use if you have longer information to add
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- Databases:
- A database link should be copied from the Hershey databases page. If it is not available on the Hershey databases page then copy the link from the PSU databases page
- Link format:https://libraries.psu.edu/eresources//[E-Resource#]
- Include a short description (4-10 words) in the custom description box.
- Journals:
- A journal link should direct patrons to the journal page.
- Link format:
- PSU journals: http://mk3kg9qj3t.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&N=100&L=MK3KG9QJ3T&S=I_M&C=[JournalSSN]
- Hershey journals: http://sk8es4mc2l.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&N=100&L=MK3KG9QJ3T&S=I_M&C=[JournalSSN]
- Books:
- A book link should link to the catalog record using an ISBN search.
- Link format: https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&op=AND&all_fields=&search_field=advanced&identifiers=[ISBN]
- Do not specify "table width" when adding tables. The width should be adjusted automatically.
- Use a thumbnail photo when adding a book asset. If no thumbnails available, use the blue thumbnail. Label “Electronic Book” in the “Call Number” field to differentiate them from print.
- Sort links in either alphabetic order (Sort Link Group => by Title) or place the most used links first.
Images:
- When uploading an image be sure that it is the appropriate size for displaying on a web page. Large images can take a long time to load, especially on mobile devices. Check out this article on optimizing images for the web from Google Developers.
- GIF: Best for; graphics like; charts, bullet points, icons, buttons, and textual details.
- PNG: Best for; screen shots, buttons and icons.
- JPEG: The largest of these file types, but also the most popular, note that typically the .jpg file type images, take longer to load. Most graphics programs will allow you to choose the image quality, Maximum, Very High, High, Medium, and Low. A good rule of thumb, if the image is coming from a digital camera chances are you will need to compress it. Best for; photographs, images needing high resolution.
- Do not use pixels in the width or height properties of the image. If you prescribe a specific pixel width or height the image will not resolve correctly for various screen sizes. If you want to resize an image so it only takes up part of the screen, use percentages instead. Put the same percentage (eg. 50%) in both the width and height so the image is not distorted.
