Content First or Sidebar?

Dec 28, 2006

This question pops up again and again on various blogging forums: should the sidebar appear first in the chronology of your blog or your content? I’m not sure, but logically it should be your content that should come first, for the simple reason that most blogs have densely populated sidebars. Every time the search engine crawlers crawl your blog, if your sidebar appears above/before your content, they have to wade through this thick foliage of mostly repetitive stuff. May be the crawlers don’t even reach the actual content and think you’re mostly duplicating the same thing!

Another downside of having your sidebar appear before your content is that it makes if difficult for people with visual impairment. They use different voice-enabled browsers. So each time they access your new post, their browser will read the same stuff again and again before reaching the important part — your post. But what if someone doesn’t want to read the content (especially your home page that is usually very long) and go to the sidebar straightaway? I’ve seen some blogs have a “Skip to navigation” link at the top of their blogs.

Since I use WordPress to publish my blog, I’ve seen most of the available templates put the navigation/sidebar on the left. A good thing is, almost all the templates are CSS-based, so with little tweaking in the stylesheet can push your content to the left. Because I design my own templates (I know, they’re not the kind of masterpieces generally available on other cool websites and theme repositories) I’ve used the <table>-based layout to keep my content on the left. I’ll some day figure out how to do it with DIVs and once I’m able to do it, I’ll offer some free WordPress templates from my blog.

Finally, it depends on your personal taste how you want the layout of your blog and I don’t brand blogs and websites as “good” or “bad” merely because they follow or don’t follow some conventions.

Technorati Tags: good layouts, blog templates, blog themes, navigation, content, latyout, stylesheets, css

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2 Responses to “Content First or Sidebar?”

Kian Ann
December 29th, 2006 at 2:41 am
From the visual perspective, it doesn’t matter… both are good, but from the SEO perspective, content MUST come first before the sidebar! The reason being, your keywords are in the title of the post, so you want that to appear right at the top of the page.

You are right when you say you can use CSS to tweak it.

Use the float: left and float: right to tweak it!
Amrit
December 29th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Hi Kian: yes, I agree, both ways the design looks good. About tweaking, I’ve observed it’s not merely about float left or float right; sometimes the DIVs don’t act the way you want them to act.