You may have noticed that over the last few days, this blog has been partially unavailable, right? You did notice, right? At first I thought it was just because my hosting company got hit, and that probably was partially the problem, but the other problem is that I just have too darn many scripts running in my sidebar.
I want everyone to know how proud I am to be a member of the blogging chicks and blogger chicks blogrolls, for example. I want to display thebadge for the blogger chicks Ad Network which Michele so graciously invited me to join. I want to show all the recent readers and visitors I’ve had from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and BumpZee. But running all of them all at once makes my blog load so slowly that I’m sure many visitors just give up and click the next link. Which, NO! Come BACK!
So I don’t know what to do. I don’t have that much room up at the top for page tabs, or I would just put everything on it’s own page. I suppose I could change the Disclosure Policy to a badge that I display in each paid post, and that would free up that space for a, what would I call it? “Cool Sites and Blogrolls I belong to which is way too long of a name?” GAH.
What’s the happy medium here? How do you balance wanting to acknowledge all of the groups and organizations, all the awards (oh crap! I need an awards page!), all the bloggers who have so kindly interviewed you and asked you to blather on about yourself and who you are and why you blog, the least I can do is link back to them. But where? How do I keep my blog loading quickly and still acknowledge all of that stuff?
Anyone have a good suggestion? I’d love to hear it!
I have a similar issue and I’m currently changing my site so that some of the sidebar stuff will reside on a separate “blogroll” page. You can put a small badge link on the main page and link it to the actual blogroll on another page.
Hi Shannon, that’s a really good idea. I suppose you noticed that your Blogad isn’t appearing at the moment either, right? Sorry about that, I swear I want it there, I just am trying to figure all of this out.
I also have a problem with affiliate badges, because I think people SHOULD use Text Link Ads, and I think they SHOULD use LinkWorth, and PayPerPost, and I want to display the badges that encourage people to sign up with them. But then what about all the other badges, for Parent Bloggers Network, and Crazy Hip Blog Mamas, etc. etc.? I could have a Badges page, I suppose.
Isn’t there a way to put links to pages in the sidebar and exclude them from showing up in the nav tabs at the top? Or is that something that is different for each theme?
You can also make customized icons/buttons for each company (PPP,etc) Make them small enough to fit one side by side each other. That would give you 2 rows of “badges”. Or you could display 1 or 2 and then put something like find more money makers here.
My blog is crappy so I guess I shouldn’t be handing out tips:)
Twitter: pz5wjj
(260 comments.) says:
Can you put a link on the sidebar that leaps to it’s own page?
Or can you put them in pop down menus or something?
I don’t know how to do that mind you, I’ve just seen other blogs that do…
Although I do not have any suggestions for you, as I am relatively new to the world of blogging, I am so happy to be able to see your blog again!
On the sidebar link thing…You can’t just create a page with whatever you want, publish it, get the url, go back to your widgets tab and enter into the text box?
I have my dofollow blogroll on a page of its own.
I just put ..(i’m adding spaces) Dofollow Blogroll
next url—-
Is that what you’re after?
Dang it…I thought it wasn’t gonna show up since I added spaces..sorry you can delete that comment;)
We always like to experiment. Have you heard about Blogrush? I have it new on my Journal. It’s supposed to increase traffic.
Not sure if you have a bit of coding knowledge, but if so you could also just make a random sidebar item displayed rather than all of them. Then everything is still made visible, but just switches turns.
I don’t know if this will help…
Just yesterday, I put expandable content bars in my sidebars to hide some of my buttons/awards…
Here’s the link on how to do it…
http://www.flooble.com/scripts/expand.php?op=get
Also, I put my blogroll on a separate page, it was just too long for my sidebar.
What I did was put all my blogrolls on one page and then hot link them in my blogroll list or you could put little pictures in your sidebar to hotlink them all to that one page. You can use flooble as Jennifer suggested for this. Each blogroll is a separate flooble code. Then when people want to just go to a single post, I have part of my sidebar not viewing as it is not the “home” page so it speeds everything up.
Lori-That’s a really good idea. And your blog is not “crappy”, silly!
Mimi-That’s along the lines of what I was thinking, yes. I know there’s a way to make sidebar links to pages that don’t show up in the top navigation tabs, I just need to figure out how. It’s one of the possibilities at least
Thanks Jenn! I’m happy to see it too
BTW…on the header…was it a no?
Hi Lori,
Yes on the header, thanks! We made a jpeg file that has the title and tagline in it, but we don’t know how to round the corners, plus I’d like to have a drop shadow on the title to make it stand out more. Is that something you would be able to do and be willing to do if you have time?
Elizabeth
Lori-That’s along the lines of what I’m trying to figure out how to do, thanks!
Graham-I signed up for BlogRush, and I’ll get the widget back in my sidebar as soon as I get everything organized
Slevi-Wow, that’s a neat idea, but I really don’t know how to do that!
Ok here’s a couple of quick thoughts –
1. Your subscribe button should be the number one item in either the left or right side bar. Right is where most people tend to put it but left is a good idea if you’re running a wide resolution. Which you are, like me.
2. Do you need the add to technorati up there in the same bar as you have the tabs?
If you get rid of those two, you will have room for a couple more tabs, no?
3. Can you make your archives into a drop down box, or put that on a separate page?
4. Consider using a scroll bar for your blogroll rather than moving it off the front page. This is simple and easy to do, I have done it on my site and it means your blogroll links count on each page of your website. I have some html code for it somewhere if you need it, these are not javascript but simple html.
Those are just a few thoughts.
Snoskred
Snoskred-So, you think the Subscribe button should be at the top of the left sidebar as opposed to next to the page tabs? Where would you put the add to Technorati?
I’m pretty sure I can put archives on a separate page, I think there’s a plugin for that, although I’m not sure if there’s one that’s WordPress 2.2 compatible. Do you know?
I can definitely put the blogroll into a scrolling box, using Blogrolling and some code, which I have because I used to to make the Friends From Maya’s Mom blogroll on the right sidebar. I have such guilt about my blogroll-I feel like I have to link to every single blogger who leaves me comments, plus all the blogs I like to read even though they never come here and comment, and it just gets bigger and bigger!
Thanks so much for all those great suggestions. I MUST go to bed since it is after midnight, but in the morning I will get to work on cleaning up this blog and getting it looking all spiffy. I appreciate your comment!
thanks for the comment on my blog.
as for the sidebar stuff, i say start some more pages for the stuff you can’t fit on the main page. that’s what i’ve had to do. it’s not the best solution, but it works.
Crunchy-You’re welcome
I do think that making better use of the Page feature is really going to have to be the solution, even though that means that everything won’t get seen unless people take the time to look at the sidebars, notice the links that go to the pages, and then click there. Which I certainly hope everyone does 
Elizabeth – blogrolling uses javascript, which means the links don’t count for anything on technorati and some other ranking tools. I don’t recommend using it. There is an easy way to get the scrolling without javascript using html. I have the code online on my server – Scroll Bar HTML
I have a new add to technorati faves graphic in my sidebar, if it is add to faves you had there, I can’t remember now cos you took it down and it’s been a long day.
I’d say either put that on your about page, or somewhere towards the bottom of the right hand side, because people rarely use that button to fave blogs. Odd but true.
I’d also suggest you move the pay per post hire me to your advertise page because I had that right up the top of my sidebar and it doesn’t work – people rarely click on them. In fact so much so that I deleted mine entirely and just put the icon there which allows people to join PPP if they want to.
The subscribe button should always be at the top of one of the sidebars, you’ll find more people will subscribe that way. You could get a nice big icon – you don’t need any text because the symbol is universal. I have a smaller one on my site because that is what Feedburner offered me. If you look at many of the blogs with high subscriber counts, you’ll see they have a big subscribe button where people can’t miss it.
Hope that is useful!
Snoskred.