Research guides: Waterloo LibGuides for guide authors: Get started

Purpose of this guide

Consistency within and across our research guides is key in making a good user-focused experience. This guide provides templates, guidelines, and resources to help you create user-friendly guides.

Your first step should be to decide the purpose and target audience of the guide. After that you can start planning it and then creating it!

Writing for your LibGuide website

In creating and writing for your website, be it a research guide or a course guide, we have guidelines that need to be adhered to. As you create your guide, always consider your audience. What are their goals? What do they know? Is the structure of your guide easy to navigate?

As you write, keep things simple. Remember that your guide's users may not have the information or experience that you take for granted. Be clear concise, friendly, and professional. When possible, sentences should be 20 words or fewer. Paragraphs should be 70 words or fewer. Avoid jargon, acronyms, and long paragraphs. Instead, chunk your information and use parallelism.

The following resources provide guidance or tutorials.

Five steps to plain language
A short checklist for your content.
Library terms that users understand
A brief guide to terminology that may create cognitive barriers.
Library vocabulary
These are the preferred/controlled vocabulary to use for library publications, including websites. They help us meet our obligations to create accessible content.
Waterloo writing style guide
The "University of Waterloo Writing Style Guide" is now available as an accessible PDF. You will need to login to access it. You may want to download it so you don't have to keep logging in to use it.
Writing for the web tips
University of Waterloo guidelines.

Instructions on how to use and maintain the LibGuides content management system

Using the rich text editor

Using the rich text editor
The "Rich Text Editor" is a "What You See Is What You Get" editor that works much like a word processor. When editing a "Rich Text/HTML content item", it will allow you to easily add and format text, images, and tables.

"Rich Text Editor" features include:

Styles
Bold, italic, and strikethrough formatting
Paragraph alignment
Numbered and bulleted lists
Links and anchors
Images
Quotations
Tables

Guides statistics

Guides statistics report
The "Guides statistics" report allows you to see a breakdown of views for your guides over time. You can limit your report to specific guides or all guides. There is also an option to filter your guides by status.

HTML Backup of a Guide

Create an HTML backup of a guide

Questions?

LibGuides are part of how the University of Waterloo Library delivers critical information and resources to our students, staff, and faculty. Based on your level of comfort and familiarity with LibGuides, you will undoubtedly have questions.

For any questions regarding the appearance, accessibility, function, and creation of LibGuides, please contact Michael Clark.

If you intend to create a LibGuide for use in the delivery of instruction, please contact Kari Weaver, Learning, Teaching, & Instructional Design Librarian.