On the 1st of April, so just 18 days ago, i put in some time converting the layout of this blog. In doing that i had just three things i wanted to achieve in the change that i would make. The first was to make the blog more user friendly. The second was to improve the overall look and liven the layout up a little. The third was to allow me more flexibility in placing ads on the blog.
In the changes that i made, i know i achieved the 2nd and 3rd points to a level i was happy with. The 1st point is something that i believe worked based on user feedback. However there was something that was just not sitting right with me. It was the advertising. Exactly what about it was not sitting right i was not sure, as i had it all set up how i was happy with. This was also confirmed by some of the feedback i received.
So far in just 18 days i have gone through 6 different stages with my advertising, eventually resulting in the current ad free result.
1. The first stage that i went through was before i even started, at the beginning the layout i choose had spaces for 7 ad blocks. Right off i decided to only use 5 of these. 1 in the header and 4 in the sidebar. This was mostly because i felt at the moment 6 spots in the side bar was to much.
2. The second stage i decided to cut the size of the header ad in half, from 468 to 234 wide. This was after some feedback mentioning that it was to over powering compared to my own header.
3. The third stage ended with me moving the sidebar ads, from being the main item above the fold in the sidebar, to one of the two columns in the sidebar. At the same time i dropped one of the ads here was four was maybe a little to many i started to think.
4. Stage four saw me finally decided to cut the header ad altogether. This opened up my mind to using the whole header for my use, which took me from 2 images to 5 images across the top and allowed more space for the tag line.
5. I was still wanting to keep some ads near the top of the page at this fifth stage. As such i inserted a group of link ads between the header and the main page. While not as grabbing as a normal link box. It could potentially serve it’s purpose.
6. Finally as of just an hour ago i decided to do away with the ads for the time being. This doesn’t mean i may not bring them back sometime in the future. However they really were not serving the purpose i was expecting them to.
As anyone that may have read this blog for some time, may know there have been ads on it since day one. My initial reasoning behind putting ads on straight away, was mostly for the idea of conditioning. If they are there straight away then they are not really going to shock anyone, if i had suddenly just plastered them all over one day. While it probably did not make a lot of difference really, there was a difference in my head.
In reality i eventually came to the decision the ads were not serving their purpose. As it stands today it is exactly 6 months since i made the first post on this blog. In that time the ads that i have placed on the blog here, have generated less then one third the cost on hosting the blog each month. Maybe it would be wise to consider leaving them in place, if there was something to support it. However the more i looked at the stats the more i realized it is no pattern, they are purely random clicks, one here two there and days on days with nothing.
So while not meeting the purpose that i see in placing ads, the final decision was more in a different direction. It was the thought that maybe this project at this point in time should not be about making money, but more providing a valuable source of information. Just to not worry about the potential income and how many visitors to how many were clicking, but to just worry about giving the best posts i can, and let the income appear in whatever form i may see it in the future. Maybe this will be ads, maybe it wont but i am sure it will be one of those things that will take care of itself, when it needs to.