Say NO to boring sidebars!
Dec
Every blog you come across is likely to have at least one sidebar. Usually positioned on the right, they tend to act as a great source for statistics and navigation. Statistics such as the most popular posts, the top commenters and navigation with links to pages and categories, the sidebar is almost a must have for blogs. Today, hundreds of thousands of blogs are equipped with a sidebar with each blog CMS providing a sidebar in their default theme…
However it has come to my attention that only a few designers like to spice their sidebar up a bit. Instead of having the same style for each item or list they’re a little creative and have tweets styled one way and popular posts styled another way. It is because of these blogs that I too have spiced CreativityDen’s sidebar up a bit. So what’s your excuse? Be creative and make your sidebar stand out from the rest!
Boring sidebars
Ugh, boring!
If you look at the majority of themes in the wordpress directory, you will notice some beautiful themes that cover the latest trends of subtlety, letterpress, png transparency and much more. However, if you take a look at their sidebars each theme seems no different than the last. Each sidebar houses lists of navigation or statistics and each list has a heading. The only main factor that differentiates these themes is the colour scheme.
Spice up your sidebar
A few days ago I wrote a post on how to Create a funky most commented section for your blog!. This is just one of many ways in which you could spice up your sidebar. Be creative and think outside the box. Say you want to display the top commenters, you could use various factors to differentiate between the commentors. You could display the gravatars at different sizes according to how many comments they have made, or you could have the top commenter fully opaque with the others being transparent. Furthermore, if you wanted to display your latest tweets, don’t just display them as a list. If anything display them as a fancy list with unique styling, put each tweet inside a stylish quote bubble. Perhaps the font-size of each tweet could be determined by how much it has been retweeted. When it comes to spicing up you sidebar there are a number of ways to display it’s contents, you just have to be a bit adventurous.
Great examples of creative sidebars
Engadget
Since it’s redesign I have found engadget to be a great source of design inspiration particularly the sidebar. From the beautiful archives calendar to the most commented, digg and twitter sections, Engadget should definetly inspire you to try new things.
Engadget - A great source for sidebar inspiration
Awesome way to display archives
If you’re similar to Engadget and post a large amount every day then you may be worried that all your posts may not be viewed by the majority of your readers. The guys over at Engadget and Code and Theory came up with an awesome way to display archived posts. The number of posts published each day is displayed on a calendar and can be distinguished by a background color: red being more than 40 posts, yellow more than 20 and blue more than 1. There is also a nice animation that displays the exact number of posts when mousing over a specific day.
Most commented section
Engadget also has a number of active users who regularly comment. Due to the larger amount of comments the site recieves everyday Code and Theory came up with a nice way to display the most commented posts. Similarly to the archives calendar the color scheme remains with red being the most commented and blue the least. The width is also determine by the number of comments although I have recently noticed that they aren’t in proportion to each other. If you would like to add this most commented section to your blog then check out my tutorial on how to code it.
WorkAwesome
WorkAwesome creatively uses post in notes as tabs to display its latest tweets and popular posts.
WorkAwesome
ilovecolors
ilovecolors is a great example of spicing up your sidebar. It is divided up into sections with each having unique styling.
ilovecolors
Little BIG Planetoid
Similarly to ilovecolors each list/item in the sidebar is uniquely styled.
Little Big Planetoid
Help me make this list much bigger, spice up your sidebar today!
To conclude
I hope everyone has a go at spicing up their sidebar. I do feel it can sometimes be neglected and deserves more attention then it gets. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and look forward to any ideas you may be willing to share 
Discussion
Nice post! it’s very important to make it more interesting for the user, not just the same as everybody else.
Exactly Felipe
Thank you so much for this post. I have a boring sidebar on my site and this has given me new motivation to take a second look at it.
It’s much easier to do on a custom site than in a general theme, especially if you want to offer a widget-ready sidebar. Difficult, though not impossible. It’s definitely something that would make a theme stand out.
Thanks for the comment Angie
I would agree, the sidebar tends to be widely used due to the user friendly widgets. However, if you are the designer of the site I am sure you can find ways of customizing each widget or coding it yourself.
Thanks to wordpress and it’s great list of template tags, the majority of things needed to be displayed in a sidebar can be achieved with relative ease.
This is great. I never even noticed that about WorkAwesome’s sidebar before. Definitely something to think about on my redesign.
.-= Design Informer´s last blog ..Wallpaper of the Week – Solid =-.
Thanks for the comment Jad
Great article! (And a great sidebar, as well.) It’s inspired me to have a look at my sidebar and give it a bit more attention than I have to this point. Thanks!
.-= Richard Glover´s last blog ..Getting to WOW! : Designing for users =-.
Thanks Richard
Look forward to seeing a spiced up sidebar on your site
ya its true, my recent change in theme made my sidebar look dumb, due to friends suggestion i have managed to regain the old style . i ll do more attractive in my own theme i l create.
.-= sriganesh´s last blog ..Freebie | Vector Fish Tank =-.
Agree! We should made sidebar more interesting. Interesting sidebar make more pageviews.
.-= Kuswanto´s last blog ..20 Deviants Worth To Watch =-.
I look forward to it Sriganesh
Thanks for the comment Kuswanto
This is something i’ve been waiting for ….. for a long time… fed up of the conventional sidebars, as u aptly put, “boring sidebars” …. this is definitely a motivation to perk my blog up a little bit.
thanks Liam
.-= Richie´s last blog ..Create a Glass Text effect in Photoshop and Shatter it =-.
Most commented and most visited pages could be interesting to add.
.-= Jackie´s last blog ..Self Development =-.
Thanks for agreeing with me Richie ^^
Try them Jackie and make it your own
Awesome Post!
Thanks Liam, nice name
Nice post, I love the sidebar of WorkAwesome. That’s great!
.-= Lam Nguyen´s last blog ..The Nice Way To Mention Your Recent Articles in WordPress SideBar =-.
Good stuff. It’s amazing how often the sidebar gets neglected.
Thanks for the comments Lam and Marshall
Nice post… Really interesting piece of observation. Thanks for the post.
-Deepu
No problem Deepu thanks for the comment
Very interesting concepts. I really like taking apart the traditional idea of a sidebar and then constructing it with these ideas of web 2.0 features, it makes them much more interactive and useful to the user
.-= Blogger Den´s last blog ..The Best Places to Get Quality Backlinks =-.
That’s a great way of putting it Blogger Den. Knocking down old, boring sidebars and replacing them with new, creative and adventurous ones
Thanks for the comment!
boring is the new black.
Great post, I decided to just get rid of my sidebar all together..
This is something i’ve been waiting for ….. for a long time… fed up of the conventional sidebars, as u aptly put, “boring sidebars” …. this is definitely a motivation to perk my blog up a little bit.
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