Hey everybody, it’s me Bush Mackel once again stepping into Casey’s blogging shoes while she’s out enjoying the holiday season! Back at my place, I’ve been putting my blog through its paces getting it all ready for the new year, and one of the things I’ve had to think about what my sidebars.
The Problem
If your blog is more than a day old, you probably have a lot of stuff to cram into your sidebars. In my case, I have things like Archives, Categories, Sponsorship blocks, My Blog Log, the list goes on and on. And what ends up happening is a user of my site has to scroll down forever to get all the content that is in my sidebars. Which is fine if all of my content is Grade A, can’t put down 5 page long posts, but sadly they are not. Which is why I’ve been considering two column sidebars.
Why Consider Two Column Sidebars?
You look at Casey’s blog and you can see the proof is in the pudding. Check out the ton of content she has, and keep in mind that you hardly have to scroll in order to see it all. In the ever changing world of your blog, you’ll often by trying to show more content in less space… Widening your single column by a few pixels could mean that you could effectively DOUBLE your on screen real estate.
Personally, as soon as I finish up the current changes with my site, I’ll probably be taking a note from Casey and going along with the two column sidebars too!
Your points all make sense. A lot of them good. But i have found two column sidebars are to distractive for my readers. Also it looks ugly. See this blog only has them on the right obviously and it looks good. I just think it looks more professional. Nice article though.
Honestly, I feel archives can be useless if all they are is a list of dates, and I think they are ALWAYS useless in the sidebar. I try to keep my own sidebar maintained and as small as possible, so things aren’t too jumbled up – I like my readers to be able to find what they’re looking for easily.
However, I think two column sidebars are great as long as they don’t make things look too cluttered. Casey’s sidebars look magnificent and are a great example! I’m a fan of two sidebars especially when they’re same on the same side (like on this blog here). Otherwise, things can look a bit crowded. It all depends on the design and how well it’s pulled off, I suppose. But either way, the clutter should be kept to a minimum.
Woo, now that was a long and boring comment.
@Tay – Ohhhhh, I’ve seen comments that are MORE boring. (#);) But yeah, Casey’s sidebars are great and I guess I can see your point on archives. I’m just glad that I’m not alone on this front and that she has archive links in her sidebar too.
THOUGH I have used archive links before when trying to find old posts, especially if there’s no search box. But I guess that’s another conversation…
I personally don’t see much value in archives links, either … especially as they get longer and longer. I’ve heard a few times that photo blogs are an exception, though, and since that’s what I run, I haven’t axed mine (yet).
If you take a look at my blog, I think I came up with a nice trick. Even if I’m working a bug out of the tag cloud part of it… When you explore a file system, or most types of hierarchy, there are expand and collapse buttons at every node. I haven’t managed to put them on all nodes yet – that’s a lot harder than it might sound – but I’ve set things up so that a person who doesn’t want to see my archives list, or another sidebar item, it’s a click of js link. I use a cookie, client-side, to “remember” whether a person wants something to display or not.
Casey’s double column sidebar looks great. But she has more design talent than I do…
I’m in agreement about the archives: If they aren’t descriptive, ditch ‘em. And don’t get me started on sites without search bars!
Wow. Now that’s cool! I can’t remember the last time I noticed a blog using cookies like you do! Very very impressed am I. (#):)
Since we’re talking about archives here, I figured I’d share this great post Skellie recently wrote:
http://www.skelliewag.org/archives-suck-and-3-ways-to-save-them-200.htm
I agree with every point she has made: archives should be on their own page, and they should let the reader navigate your entire blog’s content. On my blog I used to have a sitemap, which listed all the categories and titles of all the posts underneath them. Not only could that have helped the readers, but it’s a huge help in getting all your content indexed with Google and other search engines.
My sitemap is generated by a WordPress plugin, but at the moment after one of my WordPress upgrades it’s not working – but I plan to add it back soon.
I DO think good archives are important, but not in the sidebars – and not just a month-by-month list, especially.
[...] In one of my posts, I wrote about double column vs single column sidebars. [...]
This sidebar is good!
But you can remove the Blogroll widget.. It is empty!
I really like 2 column sidebars. One doesn’t seem like enough to me.