The Sidebar in Your Blog is Hot Garbage

Eric E. Anderson having a frank discussion on blog sidebars over on Medium:

15 recent tweets. Blog archive sorted by year and month. Tag cloud with all the tags. Ads. Lots of ads. Search box. Social profiles with links to all your social networks. Pictures of all your friends. 9 recent Instagram and Flickr posts. Stop me when we reach something relevant to the article I’m reading in your blog.

I agree with the above excerpt.  The same thoughts where the driving force behind the first T&C redesign.  I continued to iterate on simplification with the current version.  I want the content to be clean and not have other elements on the site competing for a reader’s attention.

I think the more interesting tidbit is that Eric is a template designer at Squarespace (where T&C is currently hosted).  They make sidebars so simple to implement, but it is refreshing to know that the design team has their own sensibilities on the subject.