Over the past year, I’ve been auditing the content on all of our websites, including LibGuides, to make sure that the content was correct and up-to-date as well as accessible for all our users. (Mary M helped me on the home stretch as we finished fixing over 1000 broken links in LibGuides last year, for instance.) Since we have so many content creators now, I realized that we needed some easily accessible and scannable guidelines for creating useful, accessible content.
My colleague Suzanne Chapman created a wonderful Content Style Guide for the University of Illinois Library, and released it under a Creative Commons license, so I reworked it to fit in with how we do things here at GVSU. You can find it at http://www.gvsu.edu/library/styleguide. (The GVSU guide is built in LibGuides 2.0, and is sharable, so if you’re from another library you can clone it to your own installation by searching Community Guides from the New Guide dialog.)
Rather than just dump this resource on you, I’ll also be offering some workshops in the new year where I will go over how to use the guide and how to plan for, maintain, and retire content. Invitations went out early today to all the registered content creators at the library, and the times are:
There are a few other useful reference guides available for our web processes, too, including print and web quality logos, our version control workflow, and our programming style guide. You can find all of the guides at http://libguides.gvsu.edu/webcontent.