Please give advice on placement, 3 column, too aggressive?

http://www.econguru.com

Yet another slideshow like section:

http://www.econguru.com/fundamentals_of_ecology/classification.html

Have I been too aggressive? But those ads just won't click. I have 150 impressions in this section everyday, most days just end up with no clicks at all. Any suggestions that I could use?


Thanks!

 

I think it has alot to do with the site design. When I went to the first page you mentioned, I felt like W was hit in the face with a bunch of links. I couldn't make sense of them, and took me a few minutes to find out what the site was actually about. Even after I found out what the site was about, I'm still confused with all the links. They look like a bad ad with a bunch of links running all together.

Your header, which should tell people practically immediately what the site is about is light green and practically disappears on the page. I would suggest making Public Library of Economics, Small Business and Personal Finance bigger and with a much bolder color.

What you could do is take out all those links and replace them with Public Library of Economics at the top and Small Busines and Personal Finance at the bottom. Center it. Off to the left the quote with Milton's picture.

I think what would possibly work is take all your links on your page and create an orginazed sitemap with them. Organize them with three main themes of Economics, Small Business, and Personal Finance. From there you will need to start subcatagories, so on and so forth.

Over to the side under the Blog, Replace all those links with a link to the sitemap, and the main catagories which could include some main sub catagories. If you really want to, you could have introduction to economics with a mouseover link and list the five subcatagories under that main link.

Personally I think the links to the left make the page a little too wide. I know most people have larger screens than 800 by 600 I think. There are still those like me who have sever windows up and have the windows smaller than the actual screen, so we can go from one window to the other quicker. I heard Explorer 7 had tabs, but I'm sticking with version 6 for right now.

The other thing is that your main body with all the context is way too small to really be able to read without straining the eyes. For some, they would have to break out the maginifying glass.

Please increase the size of your text not only in the main body, but also the links.

Also move down your google search bar, and center it. Give it some white space all around it to make it more noticable. If I wasen't looking for adsense ads on that page, I would have never noticed it.

Now for the second page you listed. I admit I felt like I was hit in the face with the large yellow header. It is actually different, and does give a text book feel. After looking at it a few seconds, I admit I sorta of like it.

I think you may want to leave out the ads by google between the yellow header and contents. Just leave that part white, so it is not so cramped. Put some white space between the sections and the google ad. They are running into each other.

Here is what gets me. You have your header classifications of living things on the left, and your content on the left. It seems like you placed those links there for me to click on and find out more about the classifications. It is very akward. I can't tell you if keeping the ad there is good or not, but you need to put the ads on the right hand side of the content, and have your content line up with the header.

For some reason, I don't mind the links off to the right side for some reason. I think it has to do that they are sectioned off in such a way that I don't feel like I have to look at them, but they are there if I want to. They have a much, much better flow than the links on your other page.

Hmmm, that is weird. I have a horizntal bar at the bottom. When I moved it over, a part of your EconGuru moved over with it covering the text. I have no clue as to why that would happen, but you might want to look into it.

The rest of the page looks good. If you go with the sitemap, make sure you put a clear link to it on all the pages. I'm sure many people would be appericiative of it.

Good luck.

 

Thank you so much srac, I've read through and will do a little more research and then implement some of your ideas.

This really means a lot. Thanks again!

 

your blending is very good but i suggest you to look your site with firefoc 2.0. it suck with firefoc

 

hi trichnosis, did you mean firefox2? I mainly use firefox2 to develop econguru.com, no problem that I see of.

Weird. Exactly which page is rendered off by firefox2?

 

Your welcome. I know how much it means to get even a decent review from someone. To let you know I use explorer 6. I'm not sure if it would make a difference, since you use firefox.

 

Seems to me there are more ads than content.

 

You are right zexy, I might have to get down a little bit.