New site design killed my CTR - grateful for feedback.

Hi everyone,

I just redesigned one of my sites

www dot betteratenglish dot com

After the redesign, my CTR dropped significantly. The old design is on my testing site:
english dot textworkshop dot com

As you can see, the ad placement is basically the same, it's just the overall look of the site that is different. I like the new design much better, but am sure missing that CTR! So if anyone has any advice or suggestions for what I can try, I'd really appreciate it!

 

Much improved design I agree. Since the design is now elastic, as it stretches to the screen size, the ads become a little more isolated. My eyes are drawn to the picture at the right side away from any real advert locations. Perhaps placing a smaller one advert ad near this area, under a new channel, analysing it, will improve things.

Also, the link unit at the top is also very isolated. I would replace this with a long horizontal row of text ads.

 

GIve it some time, perhaps things will become better. And I am right, that the ads are isolated....

 

Thanks for the responses so far.
I've taken away the picture to see if that makes a difference.

It would be possible to take away the right-hand column and make the site fit 800x600, but I think I'll wait a while and see if performance improves. Who knows, it could be just a slump or that I've triggered a bunch of irrelevant ads. But it's been ages since I had a consistently low ctr for more than one isolated day, so it got me wondering.