For the last 2 months I’ve been studying how many times visitors click in the sidebar of this blog. The results so far are astonishing. Hardly anyone clicks on the sidebar. The sidebar might as well not be there.
I’ve come to this conclusion by using a free heat map testing tool from CrazyEgg. This heat map shows where users click on each web page. Nate Whitehill has written a good article on Heatmap Testing if you want to find out more.
The heat map for this blog shows the majority of clicks occur within the main body of each article. I tested a variety of blog pages to see if there was any pattern and the results were conclusive. It didn’t seem to matter what subject the blog article covered, the sidebar was pretty much ignored.
So why are there so few clicks in the sidebar? Here are a few possible ideas:
1. The sidebar theme/layout/color scheme is poorly designed and does not attract attention
2. The sidebar is in the wrong position
3. The sidebar content is boring
4. Visitors are so focused on reading the main content that the sidebar goes unnoticed
5. Non tech-savvy readers may not understand what the sidebar is and ignore it
There are lots of useful studies on web site design and usability. One of my favourites is the F-Shaped Pattern for Reading from usability guru Jakob Nielsen. It discusses how the human eye scans over a web page and how this has implications for web site design.
This study confirms that visitors tend to scan the main content area. It also shows that the left-hand sidebar gets some attention too.
Clearly my sidebar needs a makeover. What would you do to improve things?
Photo courtesy of jemwseb.
Distributed under the Creative Commons License.
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Michael from Pro Blog Design // Aug 23, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Before you scrap it all, can I make a suggestion?
Try a little separation. The blue headers and grey lines break up the sections, but what about the individual links/list items? They sort of fade into a pale green block. (It’s not the easiest color to read off.
)
You could add bullet images or some sort of border?
2 Dean // Aug 24, 2007 at 7:21 am
I agree. The green color has got to go! I’m looking at a couple of options at the moment. One of them is to tweak the sidebar as you suggested. The other is to move to a different theme. There are some good themes out there which can easily be customized.
I like the current theme, but it is fluid width which doesn’t work well all the time, especially for articles with lots of images. I’m looking at changing to a fixed width theme with a more distinctive sidebar.
I have a few ideas so watch this space. If anyone else has suggestions then I’m open to ideas
3 Michael from Pro Blog Design // Aug 24, 2007 at 10:55 am
Well a nice change of scenery is always welcome. Good luck with the choice!
4 KingJacob // Aug 25, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Clearly defining your sidebar could help, right now it just blends with the articles
5 Andrew @ TFTS // Sep 4, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I felt the same way a month or so ago and ditched my (at that time) single side bar to go with a 1 column design.
The results were that my page views went down to even with related entries at the bottom of each post though (out of interest) adsense revenue went up.
In the end, I went to a new design with 2 sidebars and my pageviews are back up again as I offer links to historical content.
I think that its what you offer on your sidebar that determines the number of click you get, and using it to keep aged content assessable is in differing ways definitely worth considering (ie, top voted, recently commented, latest posts run down – so users coming in to archived pages can quickly assess your latest posts)
The more you can display what you have to offer the better and getting older posts to keep working for you (and your readers) is probably (in my opinion at least) one of the most important things to consider
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