Redesigning a blog - Improving the sidebar Part 1

It is my belief that no design is ever complete, it is even more true with blog designs. I believe that it is a continual process of improvement that we must invest our energy into, especially if our desire is to maximize the return we get on a blog design. Therefore I have started this series on redesigning a blog, it is aimed at showing you how to improve your blog further.

As you can see the redesign of the sidebar is not a drastic makeover, but rather are little changes in order to improve it further. These changes are easy to add and don’t require months of planning, designing, or coding either so they are very beneficial as some design mistakes are only obvious later on after the launch of a blog. In the first part of this series, I gave important questions to ask yourself when redesigning a sidebar of a blog.

In this part of the series, I will give the answers I came up with when I approached the redesign of the sidebar and explain my thought process so you get a better idea of how I did it.

1. Is this sidebar serving it’s purpose?

No, it only provides the most recent posts and there is no other way to find a post besides going to another page by using the search or archives.

2. Are people actually using the sidebar?

Based on my study of the data google analytics provided me with, the sidebar was not getting much clicks. The archives are not user-friendly and the recent comments section does not really help people find posts.

3. Is the sidebar useful?

It is only slightly helpful as it provides the most recent posts, but there is no way of easily seeing from a glance whether there are other posts that might be interesting to the user.

4. What is wrong with the sidebar?

It looks empty and from a glance it would easily give off the impression that the blog is underused and no discussions are taken place. Not a good first impression to give first time visitors.

5. How can you improve the sidebar further?

• I made the “Subscribe by RSS” text more prominent so that people will take notice of it first. The previous text was too small and I felt it was not bold enough. My readership has been increasing since the change so I think this change had a bit to do with it.
• I made the headers more visually interesting by adding variations in the text by making one part bold and the other regular weight. The previous headers were all set to bold and looked boring. It did not draw enough attention to itself.
• I made the text links smaller as the post titles were getting way too large. I think this change has made it more compact and easier to read at a glance than before.
• I got rid of “recent comments” and “archives” section as they were not being used by anyone according to the data I collected. In its place, I added a section where visitors can easily get a glance at what is popular, what is related to what they are reading, and posts that are generally useful.

Conclusion

I think the changes I have made to the sidebar has increased the usability, usefulness, and helpfulness of the sidebar by a large amount. These are just examples of small changes that can be done to your sidebar in order to improve it further. Ask yourself the same questions, write down the answers, and redesign that sidebar of yours! If you do redesign it, show me what you did with a before and after.