Sidebar alert! - Cluttered sidebars are evil!
Nowadays most websites have a sidebar. They are usually filled with navigation, relevant inbound links, top commentors, the archives and the feed links. Lately, when sites like MyBlogLog has become popular, people also include the “recent visitors” badge from the different sites. As MyBlogLog grew other similar services popped up, like Siteneighbors, BlogCatalog and BUMPzee.
Unfortunately some people smash up all the badges from the different sites without even think what consequences it can have. The cluttered sidebar will take your visitors attention of your actual blog content.
Let’s take Andy Beard’s site as an example. The sidebar got not only one but five different badges! My personal view is that I can’t understand the reason to do this.
Most of the time you can see the same avatars/faces on all those different badges which feels like you are fed with duplicate content (an example of duplicate content/images on my site is my signature that I’m really sick of).
Another note - you can also choose to decide how many rows of visitors you would like to have. Why do most people choose to have so many rows? They are taking up valuable space and makes your site cluttered!
My advice to you is; choose one badge, make it fit in your sites design, and keep it small!
This guy even have the PPP direct badge twice also. The hunt for a higher ranking has taken overhand. I stick to the old fashioned ways but I refuse to compromise with the looks of my site.
Posted on June 13th, 2007 at 7:39 am
I strongly agree with this post.
The blogger philosophy must be “few but good”.
Posted on June 13th, 2007 at 9:10 am
What I have on my sidebar is highly related to my content, and most of it doesn’t appear on my single pages.
I refer to my blog as a community project, so it is quite normal for me to experiment, review and promote blogging communities - the project is quite successful so far, despite not writing any successful “made for digg” content.
Maybe you need to read some more of my content to find out many of the benefits, but I assure you many of the communities have an exclusive userbase.
Lets also be factual - I currently have 3 PPP direct badges, but I don’t sell links ;)
Posted on June 13th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I don’t really pay too much attention to what people put in their sidebars. Andy’s site for example has really great content so I’m usually too busy reading what he has to say to notice his sidebar ;)
That being said if someone has a bunch of blinking animated crap in their sidebars I’ll certainly notice and be distracted by that.
Posted on June 13th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I have cleaned up my sidebar since I got my new layout up. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.
Posted on June 13th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
I hate disorganisation and cluttered sidebars fall under that for me. Despite his protest comment on your blog I don’t really see the need (let alone justification) for two columns full of clutter.
Posted on June 14th, 2007 at 9:25 am
It wasn’t a protest, it was just a statement - I have plenty of much cleaner blogs.
Those services through various factors have brought me lots of subscribers, and continue to do so on a daily basis.
Posted on June 14th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I feel the same was about sidebar clutter :P
Posted on June 14th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
[quote comment="4164"]What I have on my sidebar is highly related to my content, and most of it doesn’t appear on my single pages.
I refer to my blog as a community project, so it is quite normal for me to experiment, review and promote blogging communities - the project is quite successful so far, despite not writing any successful “made for digg” content.
Maybe you need to read some more of my content to find out many of the benefits, but I assure you many of the communities have an exclusive userbase.
Lets also be factual - I currently have 3 PPP direct badges, but I don’t sell links ;)[/quote]
Maybe you should do an investigating article about why it’s good to actually have all those in the sidebar. It would be interesting to read!
Posted on June 16th, 2007 at 10:52 am
They all bring me more traffic than they leak, in fact Bumpzee currently brings me as many page views as Google Reader subscriptions, though that isn’t a fair comparison because Google Reader visitors get full content and only visit to comment and look at related content.
As with all social sites, your level of activity determines your amount of traffic.
Posted on June 16th, 2007 at 11:42 am
I only have a big problem with sites that load like turtle because of the things in their sidebars. Irrelevant stuff. But dang, I can always choose not to visit their sites, right? ;)
Posted on June 17th, 2007 at 2:21 am
I’ve been guilty of sidebar clutter. It has been worse, but it continues to be something I re-evaluate. If they drag the load time of my page, then I cut them especially if they don’t provide traffic like they promise (re: linking to sites as a condition to keeping an agreement with them).
Good post! :)
Posted on June 17th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I am going to take your advice and reduce the number of icons on my recent visitors widgets. Something I have been meaning to do for a while.
I am keeping my cluttered sidebar though, with elements that are relevant to my blog topics and valuable for developing my readership. I don’t like the look of it, nor the page loading time but think it is a necessary evil for me at this point. I cull things whenever I think they are of no use but always find more to add.
I am using Blogger online which in hindsight was not a good idea - I should have used my own server from the start with a platform that allowed me to spread things out over more pages. I had the silly notion that by using Blogger online I would get the blog noticed and indexed more easily. I knew so little then!
Posted on June 30th, 2007 at 2:09 pm