Really the ultimate decision comes down to a personal choice, but I thought I would come up with a some pros and cons of each of the possible combinations a blog sidebar can take.

Basically the options are:

• One Sidebar on the right;
• One Sidebar on the left;
• Two Sidebars on the right;
• Two Sidebars on the left;
• Two Sidebars, one on either side;
• Three or more Sidebars in various combinations;

Each site has its own unique feeling which makes each website individual from every other website, which is the aim of the web designers right? Well how you go about having your site is a choice that you have to make as a blogger.

One Sidebar on the Right

The main reason for people using this layout is the blog feel it gives to a site, and the fact that in the western world, people read from left to right, and as such, the content is the first material that a user would browse over.

Some people still use an 800×600px, and some designers choose to work with a 1024px wide design layout, as such, a right hand sidebar means that for those people who are still working on a smaller screen don’t have to scroll sideways in order to read the content which is the reason they visited the site right? If they would then like to see the sidebar, they can then scroll sideways to see it.

One Sidebar on the Left

The reasons for having a sidebar on the left of the site, is that many people usually look towards the centre of the site, and having a left sidebar forces the start of your post title closer to the centre of the page, and thus fall right beneath your viewers eyes.

This is especially useful when you have a very witty post title that grabs your readers attention immediately, and compels them to read the article following.

We will discuss more options of sidebar layouts in a future post.

Inspiration for this post series comes from Pro Blog Design.

The number of comments on his post has grown to over 250 comments, many of them are spam, or impersonators of Pawal, and claim that the site will be ground into the ground, and that it was only bought as a tax concession.

Hopefully many of those comments are fake, but unless we can see the server logs, we can’t guarantee that they aren’t by Pawal himself, although they most likely aren’t.

I’m quite sure that Small Potato didn’t expect the site to go the way that it appears to have gone. I’m sure that Small Potato is quite appalled at the state of the site, and maybe even wishes he didn’t sell the site.

Jeff Chandler of WPCandy would like someone who is dedicated to WPDesigner.com to purchase the site from Pawal for $65,0000.

So what are your thoughts about the current state of WPDesigner.com?

The latest addition is to RSSDay.org.

If you have an activity that you would like me to support and blog about, please just let us know via our contact page, or leave a comment.

I have the following plugins installed:

• Akismet
• Contact Form 7
• DoFollow
• Feedburner Feedsmith
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Subscribe to Comments
• WP Security Scan

I personally find everyone of them useful in the way they work. I find that they make WP Thoughts easier to run, both for myself, and our readers. You also get a benefit from some of our plugins such as DoFollow because we remove the ‘nofollow’ from links in comments, so we share some of our Google PageRank juice with you everytime you leave a new link to your site, or any other site.

Subscribing to comments means that you can follow the discussion on a particular topic, and not have to worry about revisiting the post just to check for updated comments.

I wouldn’t consider myself an advocate of a plugin-free blog, but I like to minimise the number of plugins on the blog, having loads of plugins on a site, means that you have to check for updates, and going about checking for updates is a pain, but now that WP 2.5 has been released, and can now show you whether a plugin is out of date, and can also install the updated plugin with the simple click of a button, it makes life a hell of a lot easier for us bloggers, especially those who are less knowledgeable about the technical aspect of running a blog, and would rather leave updates to the tech people. WordPress 2.5 is now making blogging easier for those people who are less concerned about how the blog works, but rather the content of the blog.

Here at WPThoughts, we’re looking for a new contributor to the team, specifically a theme creator who could show us how to create our own themes, or how to personalise a theme we have found at one of the many WordPress theme websites. (I have neglected to link to WordPress Themes due to the current status it is in.)

So if you would like to see your theme tutorial posted up here as part of WPThoughts, then please feel free to contact me via a comment, or email me.