Five tips on how to build an online resource library

By Jesse

Image by Niklas Ohlrogge

An online resource library can be a key way to offer value to your target audience – but how do you design a knowledge hub that’s user-friendly and accessible?

Many of the organisations we’ve worked with over the years are leaders in their fields and hold a significant amount of knowledge and resources that they choose to make available to people via their websites. During our collaborations with them in building these libraries, we’ve unpacked five key things to consider when you’re conceptualising an online knowledge hub:

1. How expansive should your resource library be?

If your organisation has an existing library of resources, you might think it important to make sure all of them are available at all times, but depending on your target audience and how your users interact with your content, this may be more of a hindrance than a benefit. The most user-friendly and useful libraries are created when organisations are able to interrogate the relevance of information to their target audience, asking the question: Is there value in making this piece of information accessible?

Whether you’re examining your current resource library, or thinking about revamping your website, it’s important to ensure your website is treated as a living brochure that constantly serves your organisation, rather than an archive of older, possibly non-relevant information. A larger resource library could also slow your site down, or bog down the user experience of trying to find a relevant resource, so it’s valuable to weigh user experience against the benefits of featuring older resources on your site.

2. Streamline your resource categorisations

While it might be appealing to allow your users to sort your resources by as many taxonomies as possible, it’s sometimes preferable to streamline the process, and feature just as many categories as needed.

A large part of the process of building an optimal resource library is thinking about how best it will serve the end-user. Whether this is the general public, partners, or people within your organisation, it’s important to explore how they will be using this section of your site, and increasing user retention by making it as easy to interact with as possible. You may find that users are easily overwhelmed by too many categorisation options, and don’t know where to start to look for what they need On the other hand, if the filtering options are too minimal, it makes it difficult to find the specific topic they’re looking for, so finding the right balance is key.

3. Consider the formatting of your data capture spreadsheet

On a more technical note, and in the same vein as the above section, when looking at consolidating resources and the categories you’d like to be associated with them, it’s also important to consider how this categorisation tracking method (whether it’s a spreadsheet or another type of document) will be imported into your website CMS.

At Pomegranite we build our sites on WordPress, and there are many plugins that can be used to import resource category information from a static spreadsheet to a living website, but the way to do this most time (and cost) effectively is to ensure the data is uploaded in a spreadsheet with a specific layout. Similarly to how MailChimp has requirements for importing users into your mailing list database, different plugins will have different stipulations on what they need, and following these will make your resource upload process a lot easier.

Chat to us if you’d like us to assist with this process.

4. Posts vs resources vs pages

A question we often get is how we differentiate between featuring specific information in a post, a resource or a page. Each of these receptacles for information have ideal types of content based on connotations users associate with them:

• Posts: These are usually made up of news posts and events. Information featured in posts should be timely, detailing current topics or events that are relevant to your organisation.
• Resources: These are sources of information that tend to be relevant for a longer period of time – sometimes even by decades. They are more static, as they are usually quite factual, and can be referenced far into the future.
• Pages: Information on pages is almost a middle ground between posts and resources – the information should be relevant for a good amount of time, but should evolve regularly as the organisation evolves.

5. Find a process that works for you

At the end of the day, you or your organisation will be responsible for adding to your resource library, and it’s important to ensure that whatever set of processes you or your development team chooses works for you in the long term.

There are various plugins that can be used to implement a resource management system, some of which come with your chosen theme and are best for more simple arrangements, and others which are resource hub-specific, and are quite complex and granular. It’s also good to consider if you’ll need feature images for each resource or not, and if you may need elements like external links within a resource’s content, or embedded videos.

Some organisations’ resource hubs are made up of links to other websites, in which case it’s much more cost-effective to set up a resource hub solution that serves this need, and doesn’t feature a standalone page for each resource.