Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
The curious case of the sidebar
Sidebars where introduced on websites back in time when we would make layouts with tables or frames. That was in time before anyone knew anything about anything about web. The websites where built with the idea of blocks: Tables with their rows and columns or boxes of frames on the top, middle, bottom, left and right.
Currently lots of webby-techy-types are campaigning against sidebars. They want the websites to be cleared off of sidebars altogether. In some cases it makes sense. Often a site doesn't need a sidebar and in many cases it's filled with useless stuff. These webby-techy-types make a valid point against sidebar: It can be distracting and cluttered. However they also say nobody ever looks the sidebar and say the sidebar is always totally useless.
Some blogs don't have sidebars, archives, information of the ways to contact the writer and so forth. That's a great way to make sure people will leave the blog after reading that one story. Sometimes minimal gets too minimal. Basically there are certain things your blog or work site needs. They don't necessarily have to be on the sidebar, but make sure they are somehow really easy to find.
More and more websites have mobile versions or are responsive. In case your website is responsive or has a mobile site it looks different on different devices. Mobile sites have a bad habit of hiding the whole sidebar and responsive sites often drop the sidebar below the main content. That's where it really resides.
In the source code of your website the sidebar is there below the content. Unless your website is badly made. Basically the styling is there for aesthetic reasons. It doesn't really place contents anywhere. If you turn the styling off the sidebar won't be next to the content. This is important for you to know. For instance screen readers (for people who cannot see or don't see very well) read the site in the order of it's source.
In case you don't really care about people with eye problems or different devices you might think about your Google rankings. The search engines "see" your website in similar way as the screen readers. Nowadays it's a bit more complicated than that, because certain styles are also taken in account. But let's not get sidetracked. The content lower on the site is less important than the content on the top of your page. Remember, sidebar is not on the top, even if it's styled to be on the top. It's on the bottom. Before the footer.
I think sidebar it as extra content, similar to footer, but not quite. I often call it sideshow. It's more describing of what's going on. It's the stuff that I want or need to be featured on the site, but isn't so important that it needs to be on the top all the time. It could reside below the content as well.
From this point of view blogs are a bit problematic. For one they usually have several blog posts or their excerpts on the first (front or blog) page. The blog posts can also be pretty long. Thus anything below this content is so far down most people won't ever see it. On the other hand anything extra above the content is really distracting. Much more distracting than the stuff on the side. And I'm not even going to touch the inflamed case of advertisement this time. Not everyone has interest to scroll down or, more importantly, they don't know or come to think there might be more there below it all.
Here I will thread a bit away from the main topic: Many of the blogs without sidebars have way too wide content areas. There's a reason why most books are pretty narrow. When the column width is made too wide it makes reading the text slower. Less you need to move your eyes to read the text the faster you read it. So stop making the text areas so stupid wide, whether there is a sidebar or not.
Anyways the case of the sidebar is interesting. I do get why sidebars can be distracting and useless. Also I get how they can be very useful and quite important too. It would be awesome if we stopped calling sidebars as such, because they aren't always on the side.
Do you hate sidebars on websites? Or do you expect to find certain information on them? Do tell on the comments section below this post.
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