I am pretty certain that a large portion of my readers have blogs of their own.

Do you have a sidebar? If so, is it on the right, left, or both?

I recently read an interesting article discussing the merits of both right and left sidebars.

I contemplated my own sidebar position. And after much consideration, I decided to try a right sidebar.

(And luckily, Squarespace allows me to do this with just a click of a button.)

The main reason for this change is because I want content to be king. In addition, I want this blog to be more user-friendly:

1. Most of my readers (who are western) read left to right, and as a result, scan a page left to right. A right sidebar ensures that the first thing my readers will see will be my content.
2. Visitors with lower image resolutions will not be forced to scroll to read my posts.
3. Some argue that a right sidebar is easier to navigate for right-handed mouse users.

I know that these days, one of the most popular reasons for right sidebars is for SEO purposes: a right sidebar is more friendly to search engines, ensuring that your content is loaded before your sidebar (unless coded specifically not to do so). However, I honestly believe that when it comes to gaining more exposure, providing good quality content far supercedes something as trivial as sidebar position. Thus I did not take SEO into consideration when making the change.

Visually, I think that a left sidebar looks better on my site. However, this may just be due to the fact that I’m not used to the change.

What do you think? Left or right?