Chrome About to Overtake IE on My Site

I’m thinking about redesigning my theme again and I’m considering a few key
design options: single vs. dual sidebars, and, if I go with a single, which
side to put it on.

First I started reading about the prominent opinions on the matter but
quickly realized that I preferred the “what are people actually using”
approach. One of my favorite blogs is Daring Fireball, and he uses a single
sidebar on the left, but I’m sure there are other brilliant sites that do
something different. So I decided to look at some big sites and do an
informal tally.

The Sites

Of course, even deciding what to sample is a big problem, so I decided to
start with with a
top-25 list of blogs from ebismba, which was a top Google hit for “top blogs” and then just hit a few others
that I though were noteworthy because they focus on design.

1. Huffington Post: three content panesThis is what I call
   the modern style of content display, where you don’t really have a pure
   division of content between a main area and a sidebar, but rather use
   multiple main content areas–usually with some doing more text and some
   doing more video, etc.

2. TMZ: single sidebar on right

3. Engadget: single sidebar on right

4. Gizmodo: top and left nav

5. Mashable: single sidebar on right

6. Techcrunch: single sidebar on right Unsupervised
   Learning — Security, Tech, and AI in 10 minutes… Get a weekly
   breakdown of what’s happening in security and tech—and why it matters.        

7. Gawker: top and left nav

8. Lifehacker: top and left nav

9. BoingBoing: right nav

10. Daring Fireball: left nav

11. Daily Koz: two right sidebars

Meh, I’m not really getting much out of this it seems. The one thing I can
kind of see is that pure nav on the left is pretty rare, so I guess that’s
something. ::

Notes

1 I’ve always found left sidebars to be really intuitive because you first
pick what you want to do then you do it–>flowing left to right. But at
the same time it also seems logical to give people content first if they
come directly to an article of yours, with navigation to the right of that.