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I would like to have some suggestions on how to fill my sidebar empty space on a feed aggregator. One solution may be advertising, but for now advertising is not acceptable in the page.

A second solution might be to increase the width of the right side. This makes the page hard to read.

A third solution may be to show something like "top posts" but it makes the whole page a mess. Articles on the left, articles on the right.

For now I have a small graphic at the top of it saying "we need your opinions" because it is a new website.

Thank you for any suggestions.

enter image description here

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i fear this question gonna be closed you should read graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/faq... – Jack Oct 11 '11 at 5:01
its Brainstorming or idea gathering, and i think mods gonna close this... – Jack Oct 11 '11 at 5:02
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I'm leaving this open. It isn't asking what to do with the site in general, but a specific area of the site. The question has led to an unexpected but valid theme: put the white space down and back away slowly. – Philip Regan Oct 12 '11 at 18:13

3 Answers

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Does it have to be filled?

Seriously. Is it necessary to jam every pixel full of stuff? Can't the design have some white space to breathe?

Besides, that sidebar is going to be lost to banner blindness anyway. I say leave it alone.

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I find sidebars to be best placed on the right side for sites like this (ie, sites where there are lots of thumbnail images on the left). Mainly because the text is already left-aligned and ragged-right, so any whitespace on the right seems to look just fine.

However, if you must use a left-sidebar: you could implement a fixed navigation menu.

Here's some inspiration for your sidebar:

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Thank you for this great links. The "bad thing" is that I have a top navigation and my links are only 3. I will get it to the left site to see how it looks like – kaoukkos Oct 10 '11 at 15:17
You could add some social networking "share" links in there as well. – joshmax Oct 10 '11 at 15:43
up vote 2 down vote

Leave the space dude, cramming looks worse than white space.

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I agree. If you want to "fix" the white space, move half of the column width to the right side (i.e. center the content column). – horatio Oct 11 '11 at 16:45

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