Creative Themes Design

Creative Marketing WordPress Themes – Designing Ads That Do Not Compete with Content

09/07/2010  |  791 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

Increasingly more & more business are turning towards WordPress for their business & branded websites. The ease of use, low maintenance cost, ability to publish instantly are some of the key features compelling businesses to use WordPress.

WordPress Business Themes are also evolving, with more focus on Creative Themes for Online Marketing & Advertising WordPress Themes. It is no longer enough to simply add widgets to show advertisements!

Most of our marketing & advertising themes for small businesses are designed to contain advertisements that add value to the readers (website visitors). On the other hand, there are special WordPress Affiliate Marketing Themes (like the WordPress Landing Pages Theme) that are designed specifically for running marketing campaigns & hence are rid of any advertisements.

Too often the challenge for both the creative WordPress marketing themes designers & the users is to have enough advertisements without competing with the content. These ads scream “Look at Me. I am Important”, thus driving your readers off the track, out of your websites!

How to Avoid Advertisements that Compete with Content.

Here are a few tips that could help both designers & WordPress theme users to avoid such an unfair competition between external ads & content on their websites.

1. Ads that don’t obstruct your readers view – place ads that do not come in the way of the main reason behind your web page. If your web site’s strength is content, do not put 5 ads on top, within & below the content
2. Ads that don’t flash in the eyes of your reader – many advertisers use GIF files with bright colors to draw attention. While these could be useful in certain types of websites (like video games, movies, casinos etc) where they should compete for attention, for the most part they are an irritation to your readers
3. Image ads vs Text Ads – study has repeatedly shown that returning readers are more forgiving to text ads than image ads. Moreover, it has also been tested out in various ways, that readers are more likely to click on text ads rather than image ads
4. Ads for your own content – this is a rather nice way of advertising, with text & images leading to more important pages of your own website. These can be carefully designed & placed such that they create deep links & engage the readers longer
5. Non relevant ads – many advertising networks are non contextual. Only few advertisers could provide you with real time ads that are very relevant to your contents. You have to pick & choose your advertising networks effectively
6. Over doing inline ads or interstitial ads – much like everything else, over doing anything kills the effectiveness of advertisements. Inline link ads are good when used with restrictions. We suggest not more than 3 inline link ads in a content of around 500 words
7. Ads that crash browsers – many advertisements crash browsers, either because of the way they are programmed to read cookies, the way they are linked to external scripts or in the sequence in which they are downloaded in the browser’s cache could lead to a hung browser
8. Ads that “Look Like Content” – this is close to saying you paid for butter but you got margarine instead. You do not want to trick your readers into anything like that. Keep your ads distinct from content (and follow your advertisers’ policy as well)

The most frequent ad locations that compete with content are the sidebars. Unfortunately, unless someone is designing a WordPress Marketing Theme from scratch, this is likely to happen. However, like in many of our MLM Themes, there are unique ways to embed advertisements and leave the sidebars to more useful purposes.

Category: Blog, Creative Designs