It is so easy to get carried away by putting flashy banners, external links and icons on your sidebar. I too, went over the top in more than several occasions. Especially when I first got my Amazon and affiliate ads.

If you are using a Blogger template, it is very easy to clean up your sidebar. It makes for easy viewing and good blog feng shui.

A standard Blogger template is designed in CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Some bloggers use an external source to re-design their template, but in this case you will not be needing it. We will be working on line with the blogger template.

The most important thing you need to know about your blog sidebar is the width. Knowing this information will prevent you from including banners and icons that are too big for the sidebar. Using an image bigger than the width will make your sidebar appear on the bottom of your page instead of being parallel to your post.

How to find the width of your sidebar is tricky as CSS style codes differ from one template designer to another. I suggest you go to the template tab, and if X does mark the spot, you will be able to get your sidebar width by entering Control F on your keypad and using "sidebar" as the search word. The first match should be sidebar-wrapper (or a variation) and about 2 or 3 lines underneath it, you should find 250px (example). Most sidebar widths are about 200px - 275px. If you have a blog like mine, Pannasmontata labels his containers differently. You can just go ahead and ask me and I will get you the width info.

Something else to remember, your sidebar will already contain a pre-set sections such as profile, links, and archives. To add more sections, you will need to copy starting from

<div>to</div>.

When you make changes on your template, preview it before you chose to save it. When a change is made, and you like the way it looks save it right away. Remember, you are editing on line. If you save before seeing the result, you will not be able to get your old template back.

A COUPLE OF NEAT ORGANIZING IDEAS FOR YOUR SIDEBAR ~

Use a good font size and color for clarity and readability.

To create a line below an entry or image
<hr size="1" color="#e6e6fa">
Size determines how thick your line is. You can change 1 to any number. To change the color, you can enter the new color codes between # and ">. You can visit this color hex hub to get the color codes - http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html

Use the smallest bookmarklet button 16x16 instead of the 80x15.

Change your standard sidebar header into something more funky and bold. You can pick up some free fonts at http://www.fontface.com/fonts/a.html

Match the background color of your Google Adsense to your sidebar background color. It just makes for better reading and creates a seamless look.

Align your content properly.
<p align="center">align center</p>
<p align="left">align left</p>
<p align="right">align right</p>

Get rid of the Add-To RSS Buttons. I've seen blogs that have 20+ RSS bookmarklets! Get yourself a Feedburner account and it will let your visitor save your feed into the service that they prefer.

Google Adsense for Search - make sure you adjust the length of the text box before you cut and paste to your sidebar. If you keep the default of 31 characters, it might not fit a standard blogger template sidebar.

Maintain a good proportion of your blog posts to your sidebar. You can minimize the amount of posts that appears on the of Blog by going to the Setting Tabs.

Create a border around your sidebar sections / content
<div style="border: 1 dashed #e6e6fa"> sidebar header </div>
<ul style="border: 1 single #e6e6fa"> sidebar content</ul>
You can change the size of the border by substituting another number. The appearance of the border can also be changed to dashed, single, inset, outset, double and ridge. Color can also be changed.