It’s easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of plugin madness when it comes down to populating your WordPress blogs sidebar with cool new widgets. We convince ourselves that our readers would find them useful and we picture them gleefully playing with the little widget that allows them to feed virtual fish. Now when is the last time you played with virtual fish, well maybe that’s a bad example as virtual fish can be pretty fun sometimes. But what value does it provide to your reader and furthermore, how is it in any way relevant to the message you are trying to get across with your blog.
Now take a step back for a moment and go check your analytics (this is where someone usually, sarcastically, says “I’ll wait a second while you go ahead and open that”). Once you have your analytics open, check to see how much traffic your categories and tags are getting. Also check to see if any author pages are getting some decent traffic. If the answer is no to any or all of these questions, what value is there in putting these links in the sidebar? Especially considering that these types of widgets are usually displaying content that is already being displayed in part of the post via “This was posted in blah blah with the tags blah blah blah”.
So these are just a few examples of easy ways to waste valuable sidebar real estate. Next time you add ANYTHING to your sidebar, first ask yourself; How does my reader truly benefit from this added functionality and how does it support my goals?
Photo by sindesign
