I dreamt last night that Mike changed his blog design from the familiar yellow with the sidebar on the right to something much more stark, white, gray, with a sidebar on the left. The first thing I thought was that I needed to tell him not to put the sidebar on the left. Is it a sign? Is it something else I need to push now that my RSS Feed mission is going so well? Maybe.
See, when you put your sidebar on the left, you hurt those of us that might read your site on small handheld devices – PDAs, Pocket PCs, cell phones. I’m sure that some people can work CSS magic that makes the device use a design that works for it, but really – how many of you have standard compliant sites? I know I don’t. However, you can retrieve my site on a PDA because the main content loads first and if the page is too large it cuts off before the sidebar. On sites that have huge sidebars and have them on the right, sometimes it cuts off somewhere in the sidebar itself. Just something to think about as you design your site – not everyone is reading it on a full monitor.
I’ll refrain from starting on my hate of things like Zonkboards and tag boards and how they lag the load time of sites in general for now. But you’ve been warned…