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…
7 replies on “Blog Dreams…”
I use a PHP tagboard that runs completely on my own site and doesn’t slow things down a bit (as far as I know). It’s from Dan Reedy.
Question for you. I came here via a link on Bev’s site (ratherlaugh.com), and just now noticed that in the address bar it doesn’t show your URL, it shows Bev’s. As well, now any link I click on from your site STILL shows ratherlaugh.com in the address bar. Any ideas why this would be? (I’d ask Bev, but I don’t think she’d know…)
So, someone has to ask this question – how does this affect sites with skins? Is the answer to automatically direct PDA users to a PDA template? Enquiring minds what to know! 🙂
But… But… I wuv my Zonk. ::sniffle::
uhm… I’m left right challenged… but you said “See, when you put your sidebar on the right you hurt those of us that might read your site on small handheld devices…”
did you mean LEFT there?
Oops. I overcame my left/right issue in the first paragraph – but by the second paragraph I goofed up! Fixed now though.
For those of us with skins, it’s great if you have an MT index template that is really basic and just offers post – maybe comments too – without anything fancy. No sidebar, nothing. Name it http://www.yoursite.com/pda.html or something like that. The next option is to make your default skin have the sidebar on the right. Only some browsers on devices accept cookies, so a skin wouldn’t help because they would still get the default one every time.
There is a way to detect what device someone is using when they hit your site and modify the CSS based on that – but I have no clue personally how to do it.
Thanks for all the hints here and at scriptygoddess. I have a plain sidebar on the right and after reading this, plan to keep it that way. I do notice my rss feed is limited to what I set, think 50 words, but includes links to the rest of the posts. I will be checking the links to see what else I can do to improve it thou I am not sure anyone would syndicate it. I haven’t syndicated any blogs thou I do use SlashDock. Having it in the dock makes it handy. I don’t care for zonkboards, etc. The KISS method works nicely.