Left vs. right sidebar

Hi all,

I noticed that most of the templates use a dropmenu on the right sidebar. Is it to make different from most of the other websites ? Is it because it’s easier to layout the main content ? It’s just that I feel it’s more natural to have the menu on the left ...

Tristan

Quote from: Tristan at Feb 12, 2006, 01:13 PM

I noticed that most of the templates use a dropmenu on the right sidebar. Is it to make different from most of the other websites ? Is it because it’s easier to layout the main content ? It’s just that I feel it’s more natural to have the menu on the left ...

Can’t answer you question, but it may just be that it makes more sense to read the content from the left edge to the right rather than always having the eyes move past the menu each time.

Anyway I aggree with you, I prefer it on the left (like on our site). It’s easy to change on most templates, just have a look at the template and the CSS files and find the sections you wish to change.

You sould be able to switch them around easy enough. Since the sizing aren’t changing, it shouldn’t affect the rest of the template too much.

Cheers.

Back in the old days (before scrollwheels on a mouse were common) I used to put the menu on the right side of the screen so it is closer the the browsers scrollbar. That saved me from moving the mouse from left to click in the menu back to the right to scroll down. Nowadays this in not really an issue anymore so I just put it where I feel like it fits best.

It has to do with accessibility and search engine optimization. Screen readers will read your page from left to right, top to bottom. As will search engine spiders. Normal browser rendering renders in the same manner. So the screen reader or the spider will get your banner or header section first, then the left column, then the right column. If you have menus, odd bits of fluff and blocks of news summaries and such in that left column, it’s annoying to the user of the screen reader to have to wade through all that before getting to your content, and the spiders usually only pick up a certain amount of material, so your Google summary may not contain anything of any interest to someone searching.

The object is to get the main content of your site as close to the first thing a screen reader or spider will see.

Another way of doing this is with floats and negative margins, but this is awkward and easily broken due to different browsers handling of the floats and margins.

For the bots, I don’t think spiders should be the most important concern to design a site. The ’human’ end user should be still the most important, he has to feel confortable with the layout.

For the screen reader, that’s an interesting point. I’ve checked accessibility guidelines on the w3.org, I did’nt find anything. I have no one around me using a screen reader, so I don’t know how efficient these engines are. However, I’m concerned with this issue, so may be I’m finally going to stick this menu on the right ...

Tristan

Personally, I like the menu on the left, but then again, I’m a left-hander so that could be why

As for the W3C guidelines, as long as there’s some mechanism for skipping over the navigation to the content then, from a human perspective, you’ll be fine. I’ve recently been doing a lot of accessibility testing as part of my job and found that most people who use screen readers prefer to have the ’Skip Navigation’ feature.

But, as sottwell mentioned, you can do a lot of wonderful things with CSS and with a bit work, you could get the content to be viewed first by bots and the like.

Cheers, Garry