Sidebar VS No Sidebar

[built]

What are your thoughts?

I'm considering removing my sidebar from my website because:

• From a marketing perspective, I want to increase CTR to Amazon
• From a user perspective I find full width websites much easier and enjoyable to read

 

[Nat]

From a user perspective I find full width websites much easier and enjoyable to read

This completely depends on the content, for me personally. If its words... the wider the page the less I like it. The longer the width of a sentence the more I lose track of where I am. I believe it might have been @turbin3 who posted how larger widths cause people to stop/quit reading sooner. So, if reading a % of the article is required for getting people clicking through to Amazon, you might want to take that into consideration.

Have you put any type of click tracking on your sidebar to see if people are using it? Not that i've done that to my own site yet, but I imagine thats the first thing I'd do if I was thinking about removing it.

 

[Darth]

Have you tried switching it to the left before removing it (assuming you have it on the right)? On the right is the default but I've noticed a lot of newly designed big sites have it on the left, I'm assuming they were big and smart enough to test that the left might work well.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I designed my main site to have a sidebar in the blog, category pages, search pages, and about / contact style pages. A sidebar can be very useful for navigation, display advertising, and traffic funneling.

But on my non-blog content, like giant info articles and product reviews, I went without a sidebar for the exact reasons you said. Less distractions, centered and easier to read.

"They" say that the best width for a column of text online is about 95 characters at around 16px font-size. I prefer around an 18px font-size on my sites and a character width count of about 90-95. It keeps the user's eyes from having to dart back and forth too far. Consider too the line-height. I prefer about 1.7x the font-size pixels for the line height. So 18px / 31px feels good with about a 90 character length column.

Again though, the sidebar itself is used where it's useful and removed where it might cause a reduction in conversions. That's it. I'd run a test and see what happens with your pageviews per session, time on site, and conversion rates.

 

[propipper]

I put images on my side bar on content pages. I try to put 2-4 images (depending on the content of the page) and no sidebar for landing or squeeze pages.

Works pretty well for me but I haven't really A/B tested it. I figure if it ain't broke don't fix it.

 

[Andrewkar]

I second @Ryuzaki . In my website setup I have (probably...) more than 60-70% of sidebars totally unique and designated to specific posts/articles/categories etc. Most of my generic sidebars are for news posts, but even then I will create a special one when "news" is worthy pushing. Eliminating sidebars totally could be a nice test actually, moving sidebar content to contextual body copy boxes etc. Testing, Testing...

 

[turbin3]

Again though, the sidebar itself is used where it's useful and removed where it might cause a reduction in conversions. That's it.

This. I'd consider the sidebar vs. content width 2 separate factors.

Here's the post @Nat mentioned: Link

Normally, these are some of the factors I'd look at tweaking, to improve user focus and hopefully CTR / conversion, in this context:

• Structural components (widgets, sidebar, nav, footer; hide or show?)
• Font styling (size, color; contrast essential vs. nonessential)
• Whitespace (margin, padding, line height; plenty around content can help focus)

There are others of course, but usually a few tweaks in one or more of those areas can help significantly for most uses.