How To Incorporate Advertising Into A Stylized Web Design

If you have spent ages coming up with and creating a great looking web design, then it can be painful to find a way to cram advertising into your pages. Inserting AdSense is a great way to quickly monetize a new site or blog so that you can get paid for doing something you enjoy, while using your own advertising can improve conversion rates and help to promote your business.

Unfortunately, advertising is distracting by its very nature. Any good advert will be designed so that it jumps out and grabs the attention of your visitors, thereby getting them to look at the ad and possibly click on it and/or make a purchase. That means that by extension, a good web design is also going detract attention away from your design. It also means it’s going to be very hard to get the advertising to fit neatly around a minimalist or highly stylized layout without feeling as though it doesn’t belong. And when you use AdSense, you won’t even know the color or style of the adverts that will appear.

What do you do?

Breakthrough Design

One option that is popular among many web designers is to make your ads look as though they’ve somehow ‘broken through’ your web design somehow. This might for example mean creating what looks like a ‘hole’ torn through your page, and then placing the advert behind it as though it has literally torn through your site. This works well because it removes the contrast between your background and the edge of the advert and because it ‘acknowledges’ that the advert doesn’t belong in the design. Many popular site designs use this approach effectively. Here are some tips on how to achieve the effect.

Spacing

Even when your adverts blend neatly into the layout and design of your site, it’s important to recognize that they are still going to take up space and thus alter the position of your text and images. Wherever you place your adverts, they are going to be taking the place of another element that you could have used.

If you have already thought of your site layout, then you will need to consider shrinking or removing other elements within that in order to add advertising without disrupting everything. You might also consider using reconsidering your ad sizes.

Color Scheme

While you can’t know the color scheme of your adverts if you are using a network like AdSense, what you do know is that you will be encountering lots of different colors and that these are going to be displaying on your page one way or another.

Simply then, your objective is to consider this from the very start when you come up with your design concept. You might think that a completely black and white site would work well for your niche, but if you want to include ads, then that’s simply not going to work. Of course you could always use text ads instead of banners, which will have their own pros and cons.