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Standards & Styles

Adding Content Boxes to Your Guides

The pages in this section offer tips and best practices for adding various types of content to your guides, including rich text, links, images, and other embedded media. The LibGuides system uses boxes as containers for your content.

When building your guide, consider research that reminds online content creators to be succinct and intentional about what to include. Online readers "are not likely to read your content completely or linearly. They just want to pick out the information that is most pertinent to their current needs.". (Nielsen/Norman Group, How People Read Online: The Eyetracking Evidence)​

Types of Boxes

  • Standard Boxes: The most common of box organizes content items within one section.
  • Tabbed Boxes: These boxes include multiple tabbed sections, which can help you organize related content into categories and reduce the amount of space your content occupies on the screen.
  • Gallery Boxes: These allow you to create rotating slides of content and can be a dynamic way to feature multiple images, resources, or events.

Reusing Boxes

Just as with guide pages, you can reuse individual boxes rather than creating them again and again. Remember that if you create a copy of a box and then delete some or all of its contents, unused assets may be left behind in the system. Contact your LibGuides administrator to learn how to clean them up.

Recommended Content Boxes

These boxes may be placed under the left menu (Side-Nav Column) to preserve space in the main column for other content. The home page of both course and subject guides should include your profile box and Ask the Library. The other boxes are most appropriate for subject guides.

  1. Your profile box 
  2. Ask the Library box (reuse the one on the Reusable Content - Link Only guide)
  3. From Off Campus box (reuse the one on the Reusable Content - Link Only guide)
  4. Recommendation for Library Purchase box (make a copy of the one on the Reusable Content - Copy and Customize guide)
  5. Related Guides box (add a Guide List to a standard content box and select guides manually or by subject)
  6. LC classes for browsing the collection (recommended for Books pages of subject guides).

More Information

The subpages in this section provide standards and best practices for using the most common content types.