subject: Aesthetic Placement of Ads on a Website [print this page] Aesthetic Placement of Ads on a Website Aesthetic Placement of Ads on a Website
Some people have very good concepts which go on to become very popular websites. Many of these websites don't exploit the potential to make extra income. They cite easy to understand reasons such as 'not wanting to exploit their readers or users'.
Advertisements do not have to be ugly and annoying though, such as the laughing smilies or the buzzing mosquito flash animations. They can be aesthetically placed and even selectively chosen by the website owner to fit whatever criteria you wish. Furthermore, you when you create your own website, you can largely control the types of ads you get on your site by using the correct keywords and filters in the setup area of AdSense. In this way you can achieve a harmony between your content and relevant ads which people don't mind as they can actually be quite useful.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Let me give you an example. Let's say you run a popular website on metal detectoring. You have a daily visitor list of over 200 individual IPs, all avid metal detectorists, who comb beaches from Long Island to Pensacola. You regularly run reviews of the latest metal detectors and accessories. You even have guest reviewers who give alternative viewpoints and other options. In this context, it would almost be foolish to not use AdSense. Not only are you passing up on a lot of revenue, but you're actually doing your readers a disservice.
Ads in this case save you a lot of time. After tweaking a few settings, you can control the types of ads that go on your site and provide direct links for people to purchase a metal detector they have just read about. Therefore, when you create your own website, you get a few cents to help run the website for every ad, you don't have to set up your own links, your users have handy links directly to what they need.
Making your ads fit your design
Fitting your ad into the webpage is a two-fold problem. First of all, you want it to look good on your page. It shouldn't stand out and contrast at all. On the other hand, you don't want it to be confused with the content at all. Users of your site should get the impression right from the start that what they see is an advertisement and it's entirely up to their prerogative to click or not. At no time should your users be coerced or tricked into clicking on ads. This may even be against the law in some places, though it's rampant on the Internet these days.
Making your ad fit the design can be something as simple as changing a background color in the AdSense settings, or it can even be something as complicated and fancy as a special frame that you or your designer creates for the ads.
Sections for content and ads
The best way to make ads look appealing alongside your content is to divide the pages up into sections when you create your own website. Most people have their navigation and menus either on the top or the left hand side (or the right hand side in some cultures). Their content is usually in the middle and then the ads are somewhere in the unused space opposite the navigation items. Dividing up your website this way makes it clean and apparent what is content, what is navigation and what is advertising. Your users cannot accuse you of any coercion attempts in this way and you clearly identify what the parts of your site are.
Minimalism is in, fancy is out
Another thing people often do when they create a free website and start considering the possibilities of advertising, is try to make them look far too fancy and flashy. Sure, AdSense provides you with all these options for different types of advertising, but you don't have to use them all on the same page. One page doesn't need a flash section, an Amazon section and text links. It really does detract from the page. Think common sense: pictures ads should go with product reviews, text ads should go with photographs. It's all about symmetry.
These are just a few ideas to get you started on creating an aesthetic looking website with advertising content.
