Jonathan Davies

For the past few months I’ve been trying to come up with “the perfect sidebar”. You may have seen me mixing and matching, but at least fore now, I have come to a result that I am happy with. With the advent of my “thick footer” I am able place things that are less about the content of the site bellow, where they can still be reached - but aren’t obtrusive over the rest of the content in the sidebar.

There are a few things you have to take into account when putting together your sidebar:

• Importance
• Readability
• Reader’s interest
• If it will be used at all

These are all things that I took into account and used to help me structure my sidebar. There are some things, that for me, make total sense to go towards the top. Like the welcome blurb and the search box. Why have I put them there? When I come to a site and want to find out about the writer the sidebar is the first place I look, I’m not looking for their life’s story; just their background and why they are here to blog.

A search box. I’m always very surprised when I see a search box way down the sidebar, for me it is one of the key features on a sidebar and should not be to hard to find. Case and point - Techcrunch. Expecting to have it up high it was placed near the bottom pretty much out of site.

I formatted the sidebar so that the further you go down the less important the it becomes. Both the archives and categories offer easy “singular” navigation - so people can find exactly what they are looking for easily.

Another point on sidebars that is important to me, I suppose it’s for of an annoyance when you see a sidebar flung full of crap. Personally I hate it when you have Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku - all displaying the same message right underneath each other! Or when you have a massive amount of Google Adsense flung in there making your sidebar not only an eye-soar but hard to navigate around.

Find the right sidebar equilibrium may take you time and is pretty much up to you, after all there are many variations in sidebars, some have two, some don’t have any, but instead situate them singularly in a “thick footer”. The main advice I am giving you is: keep is small, simple and select; only use what you need. Don’t put it in because you can.

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