A better sidebar for your Blog

If your like a lot of Bloggers out there, myself included, you have a lot of junk sitting on your sidebar that should be gotten rid of. If not gotten rid of at least re-arranged and cleaned up a bit. The sidebar of your Blog is arguably the most valuable part of your Blog.

The problem is that you have a limited amount of space and an unlimited pool of blog stuff to put on your sidebar. Think about some of the stuff that can go in your sidebar. There are subscription buttons, advertisements, links, widgets, plug-ins, photo streams, categories, archives and the list goes on and on.

When you first setup your blog and laid out your sidebar it probably looked and performed just like you wanted it to. Over time new things have been stuck in here and there and the layout and performance has suffered a bit. Just like the garage or attic sometimes the sidebar just needs cleaned out and organized.

Now that I have brought the problem forward, don’t worry. I have some tips to help you solve this. So lets roll up our sleeves and get after this.

Inventory – Take inventory of the things in your sidebar. Write them down on paper or a white board or something. Should look something like this.

• Subscription Buttons
• Advertisements (125 x 125 Buttons, Paid Links etc)
• Categories
• Recent Comments
• Bookmark links (Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Furl etc)
• Recent Articles
• Widgets (BlogRush, Flickr Stream, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog etc)
• Anything else you need to add

Prioritize – Put a number 1 next to the most important category, a 2 next to the next and so on until you have a complete list. When ding this think about the goals of your blog. Not just what you like the most. If your blog makes money from advertisements you will want the ads toward the top to increase the value. If you have products of services that you offer, again the higher up on the sidebar the better.

Organize – It may seem like organizing is what we just did, but this is a little different than prioritizing. You may have more than one sidebar to put all your sidebar items so you just need to decide what goes where. If you only have one sidebar you may need to change your theme up and add one or even place some stuff in the footer like here on BloggingTips. I find the best way to do this is to draw a rough sketch of your blogs layout and draw in all the sidebar items.

Execute – Go through and make the changes to your blogs sidebar. You can go through and make all the changes at once and go for a dramatic change or you can change a couple things at a time and spread it out. Its all up to you.

Efficiency – One thought to keep in mind as your going through this process is to determine if there is a better way to do something. For example if you have a subscribe chicklet for every feed reader you may want to use a drop drop box or just use a universal “Subscriber to Feed” button. It will accomplish the same thing with a quarter the space.

Final Thought – This was designed for an entire sidebar makeover but only do as much as you need to make your sidebar work better for your blog.