Blog Templates Reviews

Finally settled for this Theme named Pressrow by none other than Chris Pearson, the guy that designed themes for the likes of Problogger and Copywriter. The original theme has 2 column but Blogging Tips modded another column in to make it three which happened to be perfect for my monetization plans for this blog.

I spent yesterday afternoon trying to get a good feel about the Adsense that I inserted into my previous theme but I was not able to get the right feel. The buttons that keeps following he page when I scroll was very distracting. Finally I decided to get something real simple and I stumbled upon this. I did used the other theme “Cutline” also by Chris but like I said, I wanted a 3 column them. This is just perfect. It’s very basic and has no fancy scripts included to distract readers from the main components. A tip by some Adsense Gurus, sorry I can recall who or where I read this tip from but it says:

Treat Your Adsense Like a Full Time Business.

I empatise with this tip. If we want to have adsense in our blogs, we might as well be serious about it. As in starting a business, we publicise our business, likewise if we have decided to insert AdSense in our blogs, we should publicise the Ads we insert. So i try to make AdSense in this blog as visible as possible with too much contradiction with the colors of this Theme.

There are many who begs to differ. Their school of teaching is to make AdSense as invisible as possible. They advocate hiding AdSense within your post so that people won’t be distracted by it. That’s something I will never be able to comprehend. Why hide something when you want people to actually see that thing?

Maybe I got the wrong message. Maybe what they are trying to tell us is to blend the Ads so cleverly with our post titles so that people can be tricked into clicking the Ads. I have seen many sites doing that. They have a Home Page designed exactly to looked like Google Ads and then have their contents displayed like how Google display their Ads and they are blended together to perfection. Only the Lord knows how many of readers has inadvertently clicked on those Ads. It’s another effective but evil way I guess. Don’t know if AdSense allows this practise though.

Every AdSense Guru will tell you to blend your AdSense background to that of your Blog’s. I am experimenting the opposite here with a background that blends with the Sidebars background instead. I think what I have succeeded, at least to my eyes, is an Ad Block that looks as though it’s part of the theme’s layout. Of course I will not know if this layout will bring me appropriate click-troughs, but at least for the time being it is not hurting any body’s eyes. I hope.

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