I’m having my website re-designed, going to use Wordpress and my plan is to have the left vertical sidebar be devoted to my product categories menu. In addition to the product categories (whether they are just text, or images too), I’m going to have a feature where when the visitor hovers over a category, a tooltip will pop up containing a description of the category. The problem is a few of my category names are kind of long (35 characters for one of them) What are some suggestions for creating an impactful sidebar that contains my product categories?
Instead showing the description on the hover you can create a small “More” button beside to each categories. And when q user clicks on this button you can then show the whole category description using a small jQuery pop up.
The one thing I would strongly recommend is to try out different versions and track the results. Google Analytics should be able to help you figure out which sidebar has the best impact.