Designing research guides has recently become an expectation of a large number of librarians. For many of these librarians, creating a guide is their first experience developing content on the Internet. LibGuides, the most popular research guide platform, has many options for changing the navigation and structure of a guide--pages, columns, boxes, tabs, sidebars, and more. These are some of first aspects of LibGuides that librarians encounter. As such, they tend to dominate much of librarians’ thinking about research guides. Indeed, the majority of literature on research guides focuses on navigation and the naming and arrangement of various types of content within a guide. What is often forgotten is a thoughtful consideration of the way content is structured within various pages and boxes within a guide. Navigation is important, but it is only one part of the equation.
The average web user spends about three seconds on a web page before deciding if it is relevant. If she can’t tell the page is relevant within that window, she leaves. Guides must make their purpose and contents clear very quickly and allow for easy, rapid scanning through the page body. These principles impact every aspect of the page, from top to bottom: navigation, headings, paragraphs, lists, page layout, and page length.
