My Ramblings

Once again I find myself contemplating a blog redesign. I’m starting to feel like Brian Gardner who updates the design on his blog every few months. Obviously I’m a compulsive design addict.

The difference between what I am feeling now, and my current design is in the form of a sidebar, and whether I should have one in my new design that I feel coming on.  My current sidebar has an image of me linking to my about page, as well as links to my social media profiles.  One other thing that I currently have in my sidebar is the links to the category archive pages. I don’t see the reason for them given that I have those links in a navigation bar across the top of the page anyway.

If I was to remove the sidebar from the design, there is nothing that really would affect the linking within the site. One thing that I would probably do is have the top navigation bar link to not only the blog categories, but also specific pages such as the contact page and the about page. If I go with something similar to Brian’s website, the navigation once you have scrolled down the page has links to the main areas of his website and not specific categories. I’m not sure if the lack of highlighting categories is intentional, but from my browsing of the site it definitely seems intentional that categories have been omitted from the design in navigation around the site.

Given that I generally have most of my posts in one category, and the others somewhat lacking, not highlighting the post category probably wouldn’t be detrimental to this blog.

For a personal blog, I’m getting the feeling that adding a sidebar isn’t necessary.  I won’t be having any advertising banners in the sidebar, and most of the links I would generally place in the sidebar can be added to the main site navigation, or they can be located in the footers of the site.

So for a personal blog without advertising, I get the feeling that sidebars aren’t necessary for the website, however I know that all blogs aren’t necessarily personal websites without advertising.  I do think that sidebars should be used on a case-by-case basis, but for personal blogs I don’t think I will be adding one to my next design.

What are your thoughts?  Will you add a sidebar to your next design?