5 Top Themes For Adsense
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Posted By youeyeguy at 30 July, 2008, 2:49 pm
Finding WordPress themes is easy. Finding good themes is a bit harder because so many people are really bad at web design. Anyone can code by learning to be a really good designer is a completely different set of skills because there is so much left brain and right brain connectivity needed. In other words you have to be analytical and creative all at the same time to be a good designer. Designing for usabilty is even more difficult. Then when you pile designing for advertising effectiveness on top of that the end result is a very small number of people that can actually create a template that will make money with ads.
Those of us blogging here on blog ON AIR are design, usability, and advertising experts. For example by day I’m a Vice President in Online Marketing at a Fortune 100 company. The build of my experience is in web application design but for years I’ve been running websites and Adsense ads. Today I’m bloggin as much as I can, building core content, and optimizing my blogs. I can code but I’d rather write so I spend my time wisely and search for the best WordPress themes instead of coding them myself.
I’ve ran across several WordPress themes that work great. Below I’ll share them with you and explain why they work so well.
Newsweek is clearly the theme we chose for blog ON AIR. It’s a free theme at premiumthemes.net and easily customized. I especially like the static top story on the home page and video space in sidebar one. These areas are perfect for your best core content and will help draw people into your blog. The ad spaces in sidebar two directly to the right of the videos get a lot of exposure simple do to their proximity and position to the ads.
This is a free version of WP Remix. It’s great because big ad spaces are ready for your ad code directly to the right of the main content area that’s nested between valuable content and navigation areas. The natural tendency for users is to look to the right of content (more than the left) while reading simply because English is read from left to right.
This design is also much more polished than the NewsWeek theme, at least to the normal ‘novice’ web user. Many of us tend to lean more toward a minimalist aesthetic but most web users look at a theme like WP Premium and get the impression that the people behind the blog are more professional than the people behind the NewsWeek Theme. That’s why I chose NewsWeek for this blog and use WP Premium on a blog more geared for a less experience web crowd.
StudioPress is one of my favorite themes. Like WP Premium it’s a fairly glossy theme good for blogs targeted to wider audiences. In many ways it’s almost the same layout at WP Premium but with some important differences. It’s super easy to install ad code in the sidebar and the sidebar has a nice wide top and then slits into two columns below that.
You can place a large ad in the sidebar directly below a lead content call-out box in the upper right. I like to put videos in this space because people will stop and watch a good video. Placing ads to the right or below of a video is always successful if the placement is subtle. Subtle but clearly called out ads always get more looks because they don’t trigger ad blindness.
Another top WordPress theme is Subtle by Frazier Media. It’s a very popular theme of blogging professionals and the visual design is geared toward web professionals. It’s clean and simple, hence the name, Subtle. Again the sidebar is to the right, starts as a single wide column and then splits into two columns. I’d recommend this theme for sites requiring less gloss and more class.
The last theme is not a free theme but still a very good one. In fact I found it to contain a lot of great features and several configurations are available for different types of websites. Yes this is the type of theme that really turns a blog into a website in the users’ mind. It’s a theme that doesn’t scream blog but instead looks like a professionally custom designed website. The home pages are designed to suck readers into the content. Most of the ads are on the single article pages. Excellent theme and worth the every penny.
Conclusion
You’ve probably noticed that none of these themes have left sidebars. I’ve found that the only ad value a left sidebar has is at the very top of the sidebar. The rest of the sidebar is only good for navigation and since most people look to the right more often than the left when reading left sidebars get skipped. Right sidebars are the way to go.
If you don’t believe me look at MySpace and YouTube’s user interface. Shoot look at any of the top ad driven websites and you’ll notice that the ads are to the right or below content. These are the hot spots always, and I don’t think this will change for most users unless English begins to be read from right to left.
The most important things to keep in mind as time marches on is that ad blindness will change and evolve and that styles will go in and out of style.
As users begin to learn what an ad looks like they will avoid them. If the ads are contextual they will still be valuable additions to your blog but user’s will still avert there eyes. So stay ahead of the ad blindness curve by staying up to speed with the best practices of the day. The Google Adsense team does a very good job of explaining what works and what doesn’t so watching them and learning to look at the blogs of top bloggers with an eye for ad placement and design is critical.
Choosing the right visual design style is harder and totally subjective. My best advice is to keep an eye on successful blogs posting similar content to your blog. Look at their visual design with a critical eye and pick out the design elements that give it the look and feel. Look at the overall layout but don’t miss little details like white space, font size, color, link color, icons, etc. Often it’s the little pieces like little one pixel light grey lines and subtle drop shadows that give a site a polished look. FBy all means be sure to remember that visual design styles follow trends just like clothes, phones, and cars. Keep you blog in pace, or if you’re a genius, ahead of the game. Good Luck!
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