One common complaint among bloggers is when a sidebar gets pushed to the bottom of a blog. It can happen for a number of reasons and in a number of browsers, but more often than not it occurs in IE6. It’s happened to me before and it’s incredibly annoying and fiddly. There is no quick fix and you have to dive right into your code to figure out what’s wrong.

Believe it or not, JohnCow.com currently suffers from a rogue sidebar in IE6. It’s important to check your blog in a number of browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, IE6 and IE7) to see if there are errors. Not everybody uses the same browser and, shock horror, some people are still behind the times and using IE6.

If you find your sidebar being pushed to the bottom of your blog, the first place I would check would be the comments tags you or the theme designer has made:

<- - these are comment tags - ->

Something as simple as a missing hyphen or a tag that has not been opened or closed can cause your sidebar to go walkabout. If that doesn’t work, then checking the widths of any pictures you have in your sidebar might solve the problem. If you have an image that is wider than the width of the sidebar, it can cause issues. The same goes for tables and excessively long links.

The next thing I would do is go back and start editing your sidebar with the original code. Make a copy of your edited code, update your blog with the original code, and start adding each of your own additions to the code on by one, checking which bit of code causes the malfunction. It can simply be a case of thinking back to the last thing you changed in your sidebar.

Another cause of problems is if you place a script just outside a div. I resolved a problem with my sidebar some time ago by just moving the script for Google analytics within a div, instead of being outside of it. The problem was only in IE6, but it was annoying enough for me to do something about it.

If you don’t check your blog in IE6, go ahead and do it now because there are more bloggers than you might think that simply don’t know they are producing these errors.

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Tags: Blog aesthetics //