First impressions count!
Combine poor theme choice with a cluttered sidebar and you have a recipe for convincing first time visitors NOT to subscribe to your blog. They’re too busy being turned off to notice your great posts!
Unfortunately sidebar clutter creeps up on most bloggers. So I thought it would be helpful to share the process I regularly use to declutter my sidebar.
Prioritizing SideBar Decluttering
What I do is take a critical look at my design in the following order of priority (which also reflects their location in my sidebars):
- How obvious is it for readers on how to subscribe to my blog?
- Feedburner RSS subscription – Is it prominent?
- Feedburner Email subscription – Is it obvious?
- How easy is it to find information on my blog?
- Search widget – Is it prominent & near top of blog sidebar? (I prefer a search that only search my blog)
- Categories and tags – Are they helping readers easily find relevant information?
- What other widgets do I have in my sidebar? Which ones can I live without? — if you compare this blog with The Edublogger you will notice a difference in number of widgets in the sidebars.
Tip: If you want to display Archives on your blog sidebar it is better to use a drop down menu as it takes up less room.
Editing Categories
Unfortunately my categories failed this latest audit in terms of “Are they helping readers easily find relevant information?” – so I changed too many messy categories (21 categories on this blog) to fewer, more relevant categories (10 categories).
Off course editing each post on this blog (300 posts) and The Edublogger (100 posts) to fix categories was thoroughly excruciating enjoyable.
NOTE: Refer to this post to learn about the difference between categories and tags.
My tip for speeding up the process is to hold the Ctrl key when you left mouse click on the title on the post in your blog dashboard — this opens up the post so you can edit it in a new tab (for FireFox, Flock and Internet Explorer 7). This open up 15 posts in 15 separate tabs and work through the task faster!
FINAL THOUGHTS
Would love to hear your priorities in using widgets on your sidebar especially in terms of what are your ‘must have’ widgets and why?
This was part of the Day 8 Task for Building a Better Blog.
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