Which side is better?

[roey]

Hi all,

So im thinking about positions of tabs and widgets etc, is there a preferred side for the user?

Ie, is there a better side left or right.

Normally there on the right side but is the left side just as good, better or equal to?

Could the standard facebook look catch an eye if it was on the other side?

 

[Vladi]

Which way do your visitors read? If they are English speaking its left to right. What do you want them to focus on and read first? The content of the page or a menu?

 

[LandofOz]

My personal preference is to add widgets and banners on the right side. Like Vladi mentioned, English speaking visitors will read a page from left to right.

 

[Online18Casino]

This may sound strange but as I use my mouse with my right hand, I tend to be drawn to the right of the screen for clicking... I always put all my content on the left and my clickable Nav Bar and Aff links on the right.

Anyway, good question that led me to look up a few studies on it... Here is what I found, as most say the same thing; "Eye-tracking research from Lumen reveals ads that appear on the right hand side of a newspaper spread get around 50% more attention than ads that appear on the left hand side." - lumen-research.com/do-the-right-thing/

And I like the title of the article

 

[NDG]

It really depends on the design of the web site, and what exactly you'll be adding
in the tabs or widgets. Just don't put it on both sides of the content, because I've
seen sites with three columns of information, which makes a site look overloaded.

 

[CaseyM]

Right definitely, that's where my focus goes on a web page

 

[MacCOR]

Basically reiterating what was previously said, but if I'm going to be reading from left to right then I will ignore most of stuff to the left of where the text starts. That's except menu which I'm still used to seeing to the left sometimes.

 

[SEOmike]

You want to make the website as easy to read as possible, and most websites use a right side menu, therefore most people are used to a right side menu, so that's what you should use.

 

[slotplayer]

I believe what you want to Google is a "web site heat map" or variation of.