well, there's actually a reason left side is chosen over the right. 1. Take a look at the Google heat map, were they reference statistically where people look at the most when they navigate through a website. 2. When SE spiders browse your website, they read your content from top to bottom and since your left bar is often at the top of your coding, it's better for your website optimisation.
If you are facing two choices sometimes you can do what Edward de Bono suggested Po! Alternative get some empirical results. How do you do that? Investigate what do the guys with the 10000 Ph D's doing? Try Google. all their menus and links are in the body! In the middle of the page! Yes..but? It can be done!
Well, just make two different test page, one with the links on the right, one with links on the left and see if you're getting more page view with left navigation or right navigation. This would be randomly assigned through php and logged into mysql, but it sounds a bit too complicated, that's my opinion. But it would be worth it to spend the time to create such script. Maybe I should do that?
There has been no disagreement that people have a tendency to first look toward the left. That does not mean a menu in this area is easier to use. It means you get to decide what you want the user's focus to be on. Do you want them to focus on your content, which is the central aspect of any page, or on your menu, so they see how they can move around before even knowing what the site is about? You can have the menu come first and your content second in the HTML document and still align the menu to the right. Has everyone been ignoring the study I posted that does exactly that? _
I'll say yes for the group. That's true, but generally, what I will call "poor webmasters" don't even know that. But we won't take that into account here. So the second point would have less or no value then.
I think left navigatio is the "norm". Can't say if it's better or worse than the other option since it's a matter of personal choice in the end