Creative Themes Design

Completely Bad Ad Placements That Ruins a Web Design

08/16/2010  |  675 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

Creative WordPress Themes is about making effective WordPress Marketing Themes for small businesses, online retailers & bloggers. Advertisements play a big role in making these creative WordPress themes effective for small businesses.

Advertisements could be of 2 types – one, you are displaying 3rd party advertisements to earn money from clicks (publisher), or you are displaying your own banners & creatives to promote your own products or services (advertiser).

We reviewed over 55 website designs that are run by small business owners & freelancer bloggers & found that there are a few common mistakes web designers make while creating themes for advertising & marketing websites.

Most of these mistakes have to do with Incorrect or really Bad Placements of Advertisements & Call Outs.

1. Ads Right Below the Title of the Page or Post

It is a bad design when you place ads right below the title post & the reader has to scroll down to read the content. Other times, the readers just might mistakenly click the ads thinking these links are part of the content.

For a business website, ads placed right below the titles are potential exit points for the readers, who will no longer be reading the content once they click the ad links.

2. Ads Very Close to the Navigation Bar

This design mistake just makes it hard to use the navigation links when the ads are placed too close to the top navigation bar. Imagine a leader board ad right below a horizontal top navigation bar that drops down to expands to lower level pages. The drop downs would most likely cover up the ads & lead to false clicks.

3. Link Ads that Look like Navigation

Many blog designers keep the link ads very close to the top navigation. This is often misleading to the reader & leads to false clicks.

Any ads very close to the top are potential exit points, where the reader could leave the website for good just by clicking on the ads, intentionally or otherwise.

4. Pop-up or Pop-Under ads

These are pure distractions at times. Though most pop-under or pop-up advertisers offer you the ability to control the number of times these are to be displayed, many of these ad scripts could crash the browser.

In the very least, the reader is distracted off your website to a complete new browser.

5. Ads in the Center of the Post

Many popular websites, like MSN or Yahoo, show ads in the center of the post & the user has to scroll down further to continue reading. This is bad ad positioning again, for the same reason that it cuts off the readers’ attention from the post.

And if your content is not strong enough to hold the readers’ interest, they may simply stop reading anything further. These centered ads are often known to be the ‘last point of interest’ on a post & act as exit points even without any ad clicks.

Many of these not-so-good ad positioning can be rectified with a great design. Our Creative Marketing Themes designs attempt to make advertisements a holistic part of the content, rather than an add-on, making them more effective.

Category: Blog, Creative Designs