Wordpress Plugins for Sidebar.

Wordpress Plugins for Sidebars.

The nice things about WordPress  is the number of plugins available. One type of plugin is one that adds extra widgets and other things to the sidebar. Some of these can be helpful, like a latest comments plugin, or they can be completely useless, like a random quote plugin.

This post should cover some of the Do’s and Don’ts of blog sidebars.

Search Box

A search box must be included in every site’s sidebar. It’s important that the user can search from any page of your site. If you don’t want to put it in the sidebar, put it somewhere else, like in the header. If not in the sidebar or in the header, at least have it in the footer.

Page List
If you don’t want to use a horizontal navigation bar, a list of pages in the sidebar can be used as long as the list does not go on for too long. The goal should be to keep each section of the sidebar small, so that there is room for each of the other sections.

Categories
Depending on the number of categories you have, a list of categories may be helpful, or it may ruin your entire site. Again, the goal should be to keep each section of the sidebar small.

Advertising
As we all know, it costs money to run a site, and one way of making money to pay the bills is through advertising. The sidebar is usually one of the most used places for ads. Of course, just make sure not to fill up your sidebar with too many ads, and make sure that they are as unobtrusive as possible.

Latest Comments
We think that a latest comments sidebar widget can be very helpful to find the latest discussions at your blog. You can display a few of your latest comments, with a combination of either a gravatar, post excerpt or a link to the author’s homepage.

Latest Posts
A list with a few of your latest posts can be helpful to new visitors to your site, who may have stumbled across some of your older content. With your latest posts right in your sidebar, they can easily see what some of the latest things going on around your site are.

Other Things
We don’t really think that there is much else that can go into a sidebar. Unfortunately, there are some sidebar widgets that don’t really help the user at all, like Flash games.

Polls
This is one that we see on a lot of blog sidebars. We don’t think that a poll should be a part of a blog’s sidebar. It just takes up extra space when the poll should really be part of a post.

Random Quotes
Something that less often that sidebar polls, but that still a lot, are random quote widgets. For some reason, WordPress even comes with the Hello Dolly random quote plugin.

-Credits: fwebde.com

-PhotoCredit: aboutblog.net