Ikiru Design

lindseywb (ASA)

Perhaps I’m the only one who has noticed. Perhaps others have noticed but decided to remain silent. Perhaps others who noticed weren’t silent, but spoke while I wasn’t paying attention. (To be fair, a few noticed and spoke up.)

Whatever the case may be, I have an announcement: “Zoom” is replacing “Increase Text Size” in most browsers. And though I confess to initial ambivalence, I’m increasingly certain this is a good thing.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, click on View and look for “Increase Text Size.” Can’t find it: congratulations you’re using IE7, Opera 9.5, or Firefox 3. (Safari still seems tied to text size.) If you can find it (or a similar), you’re looking at old technology.

Now, this will all be largely irrelevant to those who don’t spend hours tinkering with CSS, but this does has some important implications for us that do. Many web designers — I count myself among them — have gotten into the habit of sizing as many things as they can with ems.

Sizing with ems allows people who need bigger text to get it, without breaking your design. If your browser still has “Increase text size,” you can play with it on this page. You’ll notice that everything scales. (Well, almost everything. The divider won’t, more on that choice can be found here.) With the design I’m using, this is a relatively unimpressive feat, but it does demonstrate the point.

There are problem with designing with ems, primarily that images — barring some fancy footwork — won’t change like other elements. This is why zoom is much more useful than “Increase text size:” it scales images as wells. Further, this means that designers using ems are becoming, essentially, outdated. Using pxs or even pts will now (well really, when “Zoom” browsers completely replace “Increase Text Size” browsers) have the exact same efficacy as styling with ems.

And now, if your cared, you definitely know. And if you didn’t, you still know. Congratulations on learning something.

I recently redesigned my non-design blog, Frozen Toothpaste, and did it with a variation of the BWO_one theme. At first I was very hesitant to go with a BWO_one variant because it meant that I’d lose the sidebar which the theme I had been using, Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger had had. It was some of the arguments that I’ll present here that convinced me that that would be OK.

Now, I should be clear that this is not an argument that no blog (or other website) should have a sidebar. I think they’re incredibly useful in a lot of cases. When I surf the blogosphere, I tend to favor the sidebar as a way to get around.

But the sidebar’s usefulness gives way to one of it’s biggest flaws: the clutter problem. Bloggers — who tend to be novice designers — tend to dump anything and everything into the sidebar. Most people probably have seen this problem before, but if you doubt me go spend a little time looking though blogspot.com or wordpress.com, you’ll notice what I’m talking about.

The problem starts benignly when a new blogger will say: “I want a little note to be easily visible,” and they’ll dump it into the sidebar. They’ll say “I want a RSS subscription button (or perhaps one for every feedreader known to man)” and that’ll go in the sidebar. They’ll create multiple blogrolls, and then a few images and maybe some links to their own content. And they’ll ad a last.fm widget, and a flickr widget, and a translations widget, and the “awards” they got from other bloggers. And it’ll all go into the sidebar. By the time they’re done no one wants to see, let alone click on the cluttered mess that resides where a simple sidebar used to.

I’ll readily admit that this story is a slight exaggeration. Many sidebars are manageable while they contain all the desired content. But that doesn’t change the fact that sidebars have latent tendency to become ugly and unmanaged clutter magnets.

Another strong argument for banishing the sidebar is that, especially but no exclusively when weighted down with moving widgets, they’re a hideous distraction from your writing. This may not be a concern for some bloggers, but I’d bet that the vast majority of people who blog do it as a way to practice, polish, and improve their writing. You want readers to look at and comment on what you’re writing, not be whisked off to yet another blog.

It not that a sidebar is an unavoidably bad, or that it shouldn’t be used. The issue is primarily that one must consider if they really need a sidebar. If you don’t it’s far better to use a design without a sidebar than to persist in having one that offers no function you desire.

There are risks in eliminating it certainly. But for every visitor that’ll be turned off by your lack of a sidebar, at least one more will be interested enough to try to see why you’ve eliminated it. It’s not that ever site should either have or not have have one, but every person designing for blogs should think about their merits and problems before making more of them.