Torn about the sidebar

I’m currently managing a project, creating a news website, and in the design solutions till now, it involves a sidebar for all that goody peripheral content that a news sight makes and offers to their users. But I’m having second thoughts.

In the beginning it seemed like a good piece of content space. It’s out of the way of the news stream, it leaves you wide open to promote a wide spectrum of things that don’t fit into the agenda purported by the main stream of content happening in the domineering space of the site. And - it’s supposed value to the user. Who doesn’t want to know about more things to do and read about, right?

But now, when I’m thinking about how to fit different content in it, it all seems out of place, because I think this stuff is important too, and stuffing it away to the side seems to somehow making it less significant.

The user analysis of the existing sites show very low, next to no activity in the sidebar. Now you can argue it is because of bad content either in its quality or context, but I think the answer might be that it’s taken for granted.

A news site lives of giving you new stuff, and the static blocks that don’t get you that new stuff get taken for granted. So I’m going with the approach of promoting services when they update, and otherwise have them exist in menu navigation. I think this will entice the service to be renewed and refined as well, and not be taken as finished by its creator. Because a service we don’t want to maintain isn’t good for us or our users.