In my earlier days with my blogs I would cram as many sidebar items on my blog as I could. The latest widgets, sign up boxes, social media icons, several blogrolls, affiliate banners, subscriber counts, search boxes, tag clouds, flickr photos etc etc. The list goes on. Now i’m not saying that any of these are pointless, they all have their place and job to do to enhance user experience.
However
What tends to happen over the course of a year is that bloggers come across new and interesting projects, promotions, and widgets. Each one of them just gets jammed in the sidebar without too much thought and months later, the sidebar has grown out of control.
I’ve been seeing this more and more as I surf through the blogosphere and this post is simply a reminder that it’s time to tidy up that sidebar
Here are a few tips
- Outdated materials? Double check the promotions, contests, or advertisements in your sidebar to ensure they are all still valid.
- Outdated links? It’s commonplace to see gigantic blogrolls in sidebars (we’ll discuss that next) and since those links have likely been accumulating over months, and sometimes years, it’s likely that one or two blogs have gone the way of the dodo.
- Too many links? If you notice that your blogroll is gigantic, then it’s time to either move it or limit and rotate the links that are shown. You can easily create a page specifically for listing your links too.
Next, organize your sidebar by priority. Place the items you wish to draw the most attention to up top and near to the content (if you have two or more sidebars). All the important items, especially time sensitive items should be placed up there.
Something else to consider when looking at your sidebar is whether the information found in it will be helpful to your readers or whether you just put it there because you thought it was cool. Nothing against cool, but remember that it may just be taking up valuable screen real estate.
Essentially, whatever is found in your sidebar should serve some purpose to you and your readers. Whether or not it’s to greet your new and returning visitors and offer them a quick bit of advice on where to go or tell them a bit about yourself or whether or not it’s to point out something that might be useful in the future, you should always ask yourself what purpose to me and my blog readers would this serve before adding something to your sidebar.
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