Say NO to boring sidebars!

The Sidebar

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

  

Written by Liam McCabe

The almighty creator of CreativityDen. Loves every bit of design as well as going out with friends, playing golf and enjoying life!