I’ve got a little bored of the theme on pilkster.com now so I’m preparing to release it (for free of course) to the public. I don’t really like to run ads on my personal blog, but this theme was originally designed with Google’s AdSense and other advertising networks in mind, in fact it was created for TechPuddle.com, an advertising supported tech blog.

TechPuddle is a site I purchased last year from an online friend of mine. I have several blogs that I run with paid writers - I don’t have too much time for blogging these days. TechPuddle doesn’t make me a fortune, but it pays the bloggers and buys me a few beers each month :)

When designing a site there is no need to reinvent the wheel - sometimes it is easier to follow the leader. If you are a reader of tech blogs you will see that TechPuddle is basically emulating what Engadget.com and other popular tech blogs do - and obviously these bigger guys have done a lot of work on ad placement and site design to optimize their income.

The theme I created for TechPuddle is similar to Engadget in that it has variable width (it stretches in width to fit large screen resolutions and shrinks in width on small screen resolutions so that it still shows all the ads in the right hand sidebars- many themes with right hand sidebars lose revenue on low resolution screens as the ads are ‘cut off’ the screen!) Other features that are similar to Engadget are the double sidebar with industry-standard widths (the sidebars are optimized to fit standard size adunits and banners) and inline advertisements after every post or two. In addition, there is a header advertisement (although this doesn’t get much traffic - I’ve been thinking of incorporating a site-relevant headline above it to draw the readers eye).

One tip I picked up from Zac (the previous owner of TechPuddle) was to include a break in most blog posts - this means that the reader has to view two pages to read the entire story and then reload the previous page to continue reading down the news stories. More pageviews = more revenue from advertisements (even if the number of clicks are the same many advertisers such as valueclick pay per pageview). More importantly, contextual advertising such as AdSense becomes more tightly targeted when on a single post page as the content and tags are all related to one topic, rather than the topics of all posts on the index page.

As with most of the things I do, this theme is a work in progress. I’m going to release it as soon as I make it a little more user friendly. Before I do release it I would love some feedback - any views on ad placement, features etc. Save me doing it twice :)

Please also leave a comment below to be notified as soon as the theme is released. (BTW, I’m going to turn on my dofollow as soon as I get through the comment backlog). Chow fer now…

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