SeanMcb.com

Brian recently posted about the organization of blog sidebars and the possible effects on usability and, consequently, blog traffic. We’ve been discussing blog usability in general lately, and he mentioned something that I said in his post:

Sean thinks that the latest posts section isn’t that important and he may be right. I find it useful though and can see how it would introduce new users and provide better internal navigation.

I just wanted to expand a little bit on this point. I feel that putting “latest posts” list near the top of a sidebar is a bit redundant for pages that are already listing the excerpts from multiple posts. And, as we all know, needless redundancy is bad (and possibly confusing.) However, I recently realized that this same list of recent posts might be VERY useful in the sidebar of a single post view, especially if the post is an older one and the visitor wants to see what the blog author has been posting recently at a glance. Additionally, as Brian recently mentioned to me, the “latest posts” list might serve as a nice stand-in for a “most popular posts” list if the blog in question doesn’t have any very popular posts to speak of. For a more mature blog, the “most popular posts” list makes more sense, as it gives the visitor a quick idea about the flavor of the blog. In general, I prefer a “most popular posts” list because it serves a similar role to the “latest posts” list with less redundancy in the information being presented.