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. Read More…