A resource library page

Organize by problem, not by format

Guides, templates, checklists and videos are your categories, not the reader's. Somebody arriving has a problem, and grouping by format asks them to guess which drawer you filed the answer in.

Group by the situation instead. Before you start, when something goes wrong, choosing a supplier, keeping it compliant. Those headings match how a reader thinks about their own position.

Our page on topic clusters covers the same principle for a whole site. A resource library is a cluster hub with a different name.

Say at the top who the library is for. A page that opens by naming its audience lets the wrong reader leave quickly, which is better for both of you than a slow scroll through irrelevant material.

Describe every item

A list of titles tells a reader almost nothing. A line under each saying what it covers and who it is for turns the same list into something somebody can choose from.

Those descriptions are also what makes the page useful to anything reading it. A hub with context around every link is understood by an answer engine; a bare list of addresses is not.

Keep them short and concrete. What it covers, how long it takes to read or use, and what the reader will have at the end.

Keep it smaller than you want to

Every item added dilutes the rest. A library of twelve genuinely useful things is more valuable than forty where the reader has to work out which eight matter.

Remove rather than archive. Material that is out of date, superseded or was never much good should go, and the page improves each time something leaves it.

Where a piece still gets used but has aged, update it rather than leaving it. Our page on keeping content current covers deciding between those two.

Date every item visibly. Readers judge reference material by its age before they judge it by anything else, and an undated guide about a subject that changes is assumed to be old.

What the hub page needs

The list below is what turns a pile into a library. Most resource sections fail on the second and third items rather than on the quantity of material.

• Groups named after the reader's situation
• A one-line description under every item
• The newest or most useful items first, not alphabetical
• A visible review date for the page itself
• Nothing listed that is out of date
• A clear route to contacting you from the hub
• Links from the individual items back to the hub

Linking it into the site

Every item in the library should link back to the hub, and the hub should link to every item. That two-way relationship is what makes a section behave like a section.

Link into the library from the service pages where the material is relevant. A guide referenced in the sentence where the subject comes up is read far more than one sitting in a list.

Our page on internal linking covers why placement matters that much, and a resource library is the clearest case of it on most business sites.

Gated or open

Material behind a form is invisible to search and to anything reading the web, which means it earns nothing beyond the addresses you collect. That trade is sometimes worth making and usually is not.

The stronger pattern is an open page with an optional download. The page gets found and read, and the people who want the file in a usable format still give you their details.

Our page on downloadable guides covers the mechanics, including why the page around the download matters more than the file.

Measuring whether it works

Look at which items get read rather than at the total. A library where two items do everything is telling you what to write more of and what to remove.

Watch what people search for on your site if you have that. The gap between what they look for and what exists is the most direct list of what to build next.

And ask customers. The material that gets mentioned on a call is the material that works, and it is frequently not the piece you were proudest of.