I spent two days trying to figure out where the sidebar had gone. I tried all the suggestions I could find but none of them had any impact.
The sidebar was correctly placed on the left when using the admin panel but when I logged out the contents were placed below the homepage. I am using IE11.
I tried both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox and the sidebar was correctly placed. I then went back to IE11 and found the localhost was set for Compatibility View. I turned this off and the sidebar came into view on the left.
In conclusion, check with different browsers, check IE compatibility settings.
