Photo by pingnews

The humble sidebar is almost as old as the web itself, but its true importance is often underestimated. And, let’s face it, it’s very easy to do badly. In an effort to create a sidebar that does everything at once, many people end up creating sidebars that are hardly usable. Too much information causes information overload.

The problem hasn’t arisen because we’re all user-interface dunces. In truth, it’s a simple matter of perspective. As bloggers and webmasters, we created our sidebars and thus know exactly where to look for everything. Because we have important pages bookmarked and generally don’t pour over our own archives, we may rarely need to interact with what we’ve created.

Without being able to look at our design with the fresh eyes of a new visitor, it’s very hard to know what works and what doesn’t. In this post, I want to get inside the mind of a new visitor and prospective loyal reader, and explain how to create a sidebar that works.

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Photo by feaverish

These six themes are at the forefront of modern, minimalist, typographically interesting Wordpress theme design.

I’ve moonlighted as a blog designer, a design consultant and write design reviews every week at ProBlogger. I write on usability, simplicity and minimalism in design. This stuff is important to me, and my criteria for good blog design is difficult to meet. Yep — I’m picky and proud of it.

There are thousands of free Wordpress themes available, and of those thousands, I’ve seen hundreds. Of those hundreds, I would only use a few. Less than ten, in fact: themes I consider simple, usable, elegant, modern and uncluttered. Themes that emphasize what’s important and de-emphasize what isn’t.

If you’ve been thinking about a redesign for your Wordpress blog (or are open to the possibility in future), I’d recommend any of these themes. If you have some knowledge of code, I’ve suggested the customizations I would make to optimize each theme for usability and readability.

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Photo by Aidan Jones

It’s been almost a month since I launched blog #2, Anywired. Having never maintained two blogs at once before, the last month taught me a lot about managing multiple commitments: more than one blog, freelancing and the negotiation of even more projects.

In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about successfully managing multiple projects (for you, this might be running more than one blog, more than one business, or more than one freelance project), from the planning to the execution stage. I’ll talk about time-splitting, leveraging, batching focus and my new favorite word, elimination.

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Photo by (Bill & Mavis) B&M Photography

True productivity is not about doing more in less time. It’s about doing less in less time. It’s about defining what is truly worth doing and sticking to that alone.

Bloggers often tell me that there’s not enough time available to do everything they truly want to do: to start that dream project, to write that value-packed post, to guest-post on a popular blog. If I said to them: “You can have that, but you need to stop reading feeds and outsource comment moderation,” most people would respond: “It’s not that simple.”

But it is. If you can eliminate three hours of the inessential from your week, and doing your dream takes three hours a week, you can have it.

I’m not suggesting that you do all the below, but I’d like you to ask yourself each question and consider the pros and cons of your answer. How much time would you save? What’s the trade-off? A mental exercise rather than a prescriptive list, I want you to start thinking about where elimination fits in your blogging routine.

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Photo by pingnews

For a static page to become an Archive, it needs only to link to all the content you’ve written.

Despite the freedom of this definition, the archives attached to most blogs or websites are useless to 99% of its visitors.

If you follow the standard ‘months as categories’ model, where clicking on a month will open up all the posts produced during that month, it can only ever be useful to a small percentage of visitors (who either want to read through all your posts or who are, for whatever reason, interested in posts from a particular time-frame).

For many, a crippled format ensures only a tiny fraction of visitors ever interact with the Archives page. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, I want to explain three simple methods you can use to craft an archives page that will serve as a key conversion point for new visitors — and a place where loyal visitors become more loyal.

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