Summary above the article or in the sidebar?
On my website, I have a bunch of articles. They have a little bit of meta information (currently only the date of writing, but perhaps also tags) and sometimes a abstract. I want to give the reader the chance to decide whether reading the article is not worth their time quickly. So it is especially not a teaser text.
Until now I have this right under the heading, like in the following screenshot:
I have added the sidebar to hold the local table of contents. Today I thought that it would also be a reasonable thing to put all this meta information into the sidebar as well. This is what I have tried out:
Just from looking at it, it looks nicer and more balanced. However I fear that a reader will not see the summary before diving into the article. On the other hand, the abstract gives things away, so it might not make much sense to read it if one reads the full article anyway.
On mobile, the sidebar will go below the article, therefore the abstract will be rather useless. With some CSS trickery I could probably get the sidebar to be above the article on mobile, then it would be useful again. However, these things would then be above the heading.
It is just a personal website, I don't see I would be able to to blind A/B testing or something like that. Also I fear that this question is rather opinion-based. Therefore a somewhat objective question could be: Will readers notice the abstract on the side or should it be kept directly above the article?