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LibGuides Best Practices: Page Layout

Two Page Layout Options

Two Navigation Options

LibGuides offers two basic layouts for guide pages: tabbed navigation and side navigation. This not only determines where on the page the navigation menu appears, but it also determines the column layout of your pages. See the panels below for examples.

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Tabbed Navigation

the page navigation will appear as tabs across the top of each page. Each page of a tabbed guide can be customized to have up to 4 content columns of different sizes.

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Side Navigation

the page is divided into two columns -- the first containing the page navigation menu, and the second containing the page's content. Unlike a tabbed navigation layout, the number and size of each column cannot be adjusted (unless you create a custom guide page template).

Custom Column Widths

Custom Column Widths

Don't like the preset widths? Set your own!

Custom column widths let you fine-tune the widths of your columns even further. 

custom column widths

Set the number of columns, and then use the sliders to pick each column's widths. Some things to keep in mind:

  • Column widths are still percentage-based. You can't change column widths to fixed pixel widths, because that makes your guides mobile-unfriendly.
  • Because of the way LibGuides is set up, you're only able to change column sizes in increments of about 8%. So you can't set up 3 columns at 10/40/50 widths, but you can do 17/33/50.
  • 8% wide columns are really small! Unless you're willing to do some extra customization work, you'll be better off using 17% widths.

Column Widths