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LibGuides Best Practices: Best Practices for Assets

Assets

 

Best Practices for Assets

Use this Asset When Instead of this asset
database assets adding databases to your guides  links
link assets adding links to your guides rich text
book assets  adding books to your guide rich text
media/widget assets adding widgets to your guide rich text
  • Also, our link checker checks link assets weekly - but it can't check links in rich text boxes.

Media/Widgets

  1. This asset type allows you to embed videos, audio, and widgets into your boxes. Lots of sites provide you with code to embed media or widgets. Some of the most commonly embedded objects include YouTube videos and search widgets.
  2. Widgets allow you to build in interactivity to your guide.

Rich Text

 

The Rich Text asset is your standard WYSIWYG-based rich text content item. Add your own custom HTML, images, tables, etc. The possibilities are nearly limitless.

  • Tips to Remember about Rich Text boxes
    • HTML is used to render your content.
    • Rich text items can contain up to 65,000 characters of HTML. Anything over that limit is deleted
    • Copying & pasting from Microsoft Office applications and websites can cause you to go over the character limit.  You might be wondering why copying from Microsoft Office applications and websites can cause problems. It's because they add in a lot of unnecessary HTML code.
    • Copying & pasting images into your guides can also cause you to go over the character limit.
    • Copying & pasting from Microsoft Office applications and websites can also cause other formatting problems

Tables

Guide Specific Best Practices

Tables are for tabular content—not for layout/design

   
   
   

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Link Assets

Best practices for Links

  • Add links with the Link Asset.  If you do not, then the link will not be checked by the Link Checker.
  • Give Guides and pages friendly URLs
  • Avoid opening links in a new window
  • A Link is a Promise  by Kara Pernice   https://www.nngroup.com/articles/link-promise/
  • Summary: Any broken promise, large or small, chips away at trust and credibility. The words in a link label make a strong suggestion about the page that is being linked to. The destination page should fulfill what the anchor text promises
  • Reduce the number of resources/Links
    • they’re not going to click everything, but remember your user demographic
    • try to limit the number of resources to three to five