Long theory short: The purpose of a sidebar is to help you make money.
Remember this. We will talk about it later.
A sidebar is a vertical column placed next to the main content area.
For example, the ProBlogger’s website has a sidebar on the right-hand side of a blog post.
Actually, A sidebar could be placed on the left, right, or both sides.
For example, on the GeeksForGeeks website:
It depends on the design and goal of the website.
And depending on the goal of the website, a sidebar usually contains the following:
For example, The InfoSecInstitute promotes a free ebook and a newsletter on their blog’s sidebar.
When someone tries to download the ebook, they collect user details such as email.
And using these details of the users, they will start sending promotional emails about their online courses and premium services.
That’s how their sidebar helps them make money.
It is common to see advertisements on the sidebars of informational websites such as VeryWellMind.
If you have high traffic for your website, displaying advertisements could bring you a lot of money.
And this website is also an excellent example of the following:
On static pages, a sidebar is usually used for displaying sibling and child pages.
And when it comes to blog-related pages such as an archive page or a single blog post, the sidebar could contain:
At the end of the day…
You can keep them engaged by:
If you notice, all these things will eventually help you make money, if not right away.
So, long theory short, The purpose of a sidebar is to help you make money by building your brand along the way.
In the next lesson, we will learn to understand sidebars from the perspective of WordPress.
