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.

In this series, I will be using my blog as an example so you can get a better understanding of the process. When I had designed this blog a few months ago, I felt it was quite good then. Now I return and ask the hard questions about the design in order to get a more accurate understanding of how I can improve it. The focus for today will be the sidebar.

1. Is this sidebar serving it’s purpose?

The purpose of a sidebar in a blog is to give users an easy way of getting access to your other posts. It is important then that the sidebar makes it easy to navigate, compelling to click, and relevant.

2. Are people actually using the sidebar?

You can have an awesome looking sidebar, but if no one is using it then you just lost potential long term visitors. In order to track if they are using the sidebar, you must set up analytics to track if they are clicking on it and get an idea of the path a general user takes to get to content. If the data you get tells you that there is a high amount of people that visit and then leave, that is a good indicator the sidebar is not being used. That or your content sucks.

3. Is the sidebar useful?

Does it help visitors achieve their goal more easily? All visitors have some sort of goal when they visit your website so does the sidebar help the typical user get to it or does it actually hinder them? Remember, visitors often times don’t use the front door on the internet so they might visit a page that doesn’t help them, but you might have another article that does. If the sidebar cannot help the user find it, then its not useful and there goes another one.

4. What is wrong with the sidebar?

Be honest, no sidebar is perfect. Since we are bias due to our attachment with the design. The easiest way to answer this question is by having someone else tell you, who actually had to use it. Any comments or e-mails you received about it in the past would be useful. In the absence of any feedback from your visitors you can just ask someone to try and use it. Give them a likely goal someone visiting your website would have and ask them to think out loud. Write down everything they say, you will be amazed by the things you didn’t see before.

5. How can you improve the sidebar further?

After you have answered all the other questions and gathered the data, this is where you sit down and stare at your sidebar until your eyes hurt in order to figure out how to make it better. Then take a short break, come back, and stare at it again.

Conclusion

In the next part of this series, I will go over how I improved my sidebar, the problems that I discovered, the answers I came up with, and the solutions that I used. The sidebar I have right now is the improved version, I have a screen shot of the old one that I will use for comparison.

Redesigning a blog - Improving the sidebar Part 2