Sidebar Tips

Wondering what to put on your sidebar, or maybe how you can trim it? Maybe just bored and reading tutorials for no real reason? Well, this is the one for you.

Navigation
The #1 Most Important Thing To Have In A Sidebar is navigation. Your visitors need to be able to get around your site, don't they? Of course they do! Why would they come back if they can only get to your homepage, especially if you constantly refer to your contact updates they can't get to? Didn't think it through, did you? So, yes, navigation is essential. Some people like to jazz up their navigation, like if their layout is themed with newspapers, they might go "headliners" for home (or 'refresh', as people keep calling it), "editor" for site owner, "articles" for content (or tutorials), "crosswords" for content (if they didn't use "articles") and "back page" for host or domain server, which they are required to link back to or be suspended. Let me just say: THAT KIND OF NAVIGATION SUCKS. It's stupid and mostly unreadable; you have to guess where you're going. Please, if you care at all about your visitors, please use easy-to-read, STRAIGHTFORWARD navigation. 'Site', 'Me/Owner' (Or Webmiss/tress like I use, but let's keep it gender neutral here), 'Content', 'Tutorials', 'Home', 'Host'. Is that so hard? Your visitors will appreciate it and it makes your site more professional and user-friendly.

You
Lots of people find it necessary to give a first-time visitor your life story in your sidebar complete with stupid italics and underlines, Ch4tsp3ak!, random CAPITALISATION and exclamation MARKSSS!!!! and LOVES and ~~HATES~~, where you are located, who your boyfriend <3 <3 <333333 is, why you got into w3bD3S1Gnnn, your ~~ageeee~~ and your favourite subject at ~~SKOOOOL~~, plus a sexy!! photo, which in actual fact is really sluttyy.

Seriously.

Nobody wants to know. I don't really care about most of those things about a site owner. The most I want to know is if they are a boy or a girl, a few likes and dislikes (give me an idea of what they are like) and maybe their age. A photo is not necessary, but sometimes a nice touch. It doesn't need heaps of stupid italics, underlines, bolds, strikethroughs and capitalisations, and chatspeak is never appropriate. If you really want to tell people so much about your life, put it on your "me" page, where you can blabber on about yourself as long as you like and the people who read it will actually want to know. As you can see on my page, I don't even have a "Me" section, because you can tell who I am from the blogs, and if you need to know you can see my "Webmiss" page.

Affies
In my first site, I thought it was cool to have Sisters, Affies, Link Exchanges and a Plugboard. I did get to meet a lot of people, but apart from their own page for each type of link and their position in my sidebar there was absolutely no difference. Have you ever seen a really big site, or even a moderately big site, with sisters, link exchanges, etc.? I haven't. I only have about six affi(liat)es at a time, because they're my friends. I've found I don't need sisters, link exchanges and a plugboard, because there's no point. This is different from advertising, by the way, which is below. You may choose to make your own previews for your affies, using their site buttons or downloading someone else's affie previews so that they all look the same (which is a bit annoying, but not as much as sixty flashing 88x31 buttons burning my eyes). I'm not that fussed about how your display your affies, but as always think about your visitor.

Advertising
I have no problem with advertising; if you don't really want to have to keep up with people and just want your site plugged everywhere, go for it. Displaying advertising also has a certain degree of satisfaction - "My site is so big people want to advertise it", and such. Some sites incorporate a space for advertising in their layout, and some have it floating away from the content (I prefer this one, actually, I think it looks best) and some put it in the sidebar. If you do put it in your sidebar, I'd recommend you put it at the top, because it's not really advertising if you shove your poor advertisees down the bottom of the page where nobody goes. As with affies, you probably want a discreet "apply?" button, whether on your advertising rotation (because rotations are of course the best :P) or underneath the button.

Site Button
If people want to use your resources and find that you would like them to link back (I assume, unless you're some kind of resource whore), they probably want quick access to your button. Putting it in the sidebar with a code for that particular button is one way to solve the problem. You don't have to have these dolled-up, CSS-enriched textboxes, although people seem to think it makes the box match the layout. If you have more than one button, a small link below like "more?" or "fussy?" (although that "fussy?" one is rather assuming) can help the visitor out. Some people even make a button that changes when they change their layout, by replacing the image every time. That's pretty useful unless the button was selected for colour or whatever, but that's only for "fussy?" people.

Comment Section
If you are one of those people who doesn't like it when people comment on your blog if it's not about the blog, a comment box (like my Cbox) is probably a really good choice. I find it annoying how my blog ends up getting 1 or 0 comments when my Cbox is flooded with people commenting, but I still prefer to have both methods of communication there. Some people shove their tagboard away on a separate page, but I must wonder why. How many people would want to go to that trouble instead of commenting on your blog? Why would you want to go to that page to check it all the time? It's your choice, I guess, but if you have a tagboard, keep it small, neat and in colour scheme.

Online Users
I know I always get excited when there's someone on my site at the same time as me, but lots of sites find no use for online users. I guess there isn't a whole lot of point to it, but I like it and most of the people I know use them. Plus they're fun to change around, like '2 Elephants' instead of '2 Online', and changing them doesn't really hurt anybody or annoy them.

Extras
Okay, I'm tired of writing long paragraphs (you can probably tell they're getting shorter), so here's a bunch of stuff I think you could never need on your sidebar:

Every single button you have
A description of your site (you don't really need it, you know)
Your last blog
Your last blog comment
Your last update
Your top commenters
Your last commenter
Links to your personal facebook, twitter, youtube and email (ones dedicated to your site or ones that aren't that personal are okay)
Your site name (duh)
Your site URL (again, duh)
Your name (but only where you've already written a "me" bit)
The date your site opened
The previous four points in a stats table
The nationalities of your visitors
Your (NON-unique) hit counter
A feed from your twitter account
A separates sidebar where you list every single scrap of content you have

And stuff that I like to see (because my opinion is the most important):

Layout information
Your personal links (logging into your blog, stats, etc.)
XHTML & CSS validators
Links to a site map, home, back to top (only at the bottom)
A FEW links to sites/blogs you like (very circumstantial)

In conclusion: Do whatever you like with your sidebar, but if you don't like it, your visitors will hate it, and you probably want a second opinion when your sidebar jackpots from 3 parts to 12.