Making a guide

All the guides use similar layouts, with the same header, footer and side bar navigation. The pages all have some CSS code that makes the side navigation appear in bold, helping with accessibility and contrast. There are two main types of side navigation; one that depends on and lists the paragraph titles and one that will link to different pages if there is a lot of content. Side navigation looks much better when looked at on a mobile phone. More help on customising side navigation is available from SpringShare. Always use the system CSS that has made changes to improve accessibility. All box content should be Verdana, size 16 and this is the default.

All the guides sit inside the larger system that is the whole site, broken down into groups. This helps users to find what they need faster and helps us to manage the information. Each group has a home page. Chose the group that best suits your guide or create a new group. It's important that you speak to your line manager before doing this as the new group will need to be mapped to the existing site or new buttons may need to be added to the group home page or your new guide will be hard for people to find.

There are lots of ways that your guide can be made to look how you want with coding. However, all guides will still need to meet the WCAG guidelines and also fit with the look and feel of the site so seek advice from your line manger before you make any big changes.

It's nice to add features that makes content more fun but we need to be careful that what we create or products that we use and import are accessible. Use the guide about checking accessibility on the product before making a decision to use it. We need to be particularly careful about adding PDFs as, unless they were made accessible at their creation, they can be very hard to use with assistive technologies.