infundibulum

When I can’t think of something to work on, sometimes I will try cloning the broad outlines of the designs of random websites (without looking at the css), just to see how quickly I can hackup n-column layouts, headers, blah blah blah.

In just such a mood the other night, I asked myself what the average width of left navigation bars is across a variety of sites. 100px? 15%? What?

So, by coincidence I happened to have recently read Dave Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere and he has a chart of some very popular websites. So, I decided to do a little survey.

Using my handly ruler bookmarklet from centricle.com, I went through all the sites (yes, I’m obsessive) on Sifry’s list and measured how wide their left sidebars were in pixels.

The results surprised me: about half of them didn’t have left sidebars at all.

Here’s my table. The rows with a light red background don’t have a left sidebar at all. As you can see, it’s about 50/50.

What seems to be the trend (especially among news sites) is to put the navigation stuff in a horizontal nav bar across the top, and a large feature story (often with an image) flush left. Perhaps this trend has to do with generally increasing screen width?