Marketing Online Secrets

The Importance of Header - Lesson Learned

I have a niche website on weight loss that is doing relatively well. Every week when I check my adsense account, there will be visitors and clicks.

Clickable header seems to be the ‘in’ thing nowadays, and I thought why not make my header clickable and send the traffic to an affiliate link and make more $$$. Great idea, isn’t it? So I started researching on how to insert clickable headers and succesfully inserted a banner ad as my header. I was quite proud of myself too for coming up with that idea.

Then, one week goes by, no clicks. Another week goes by, no clicks. For an entire month, I didn’t make any sales for that affiliate poduct. Heck, according to my stats, nobody ever click on that banner header either.

It begin to dawn on me that the banner ad is the problem. The ad showed the trim torso of a man and a woman. With lots of bare skin, it has made my website looks cheap and drove customers away. Not only that, the new header does not blend in with the overall design of the site.

With that light bulb, I quickly pull off the banner ad and replace back the original header. The very next day, my clicks started coming in again.

Lessons learned:

1) Headers are important.

2) Better to have no header than to have one which is not appealing to your visitors.

Some so called ‘gurus’ had said that website design is not important and it is ok to have garish looking website. This case study proved that they are wrong.

If you need help in your header or website design, this is a resource that I recommend.

Tags: header design problem, Importance of header

Wordpress Theme Problem

You’ll probably have noticed by now.

Yes, I am having problem with my wordpress theme. It keeps reverting to the unpretty default Kubrick theme
I have googled for a solution and found that I am not the only one with this bug. It seems that lots of wordpress 2.2 users are having the same problem.

Some of the suggestions to overcome includes:

1) deactivate all your plugins (did that)

2) upgrade to Wordpress 2.3 (did that too)

3) delete your default theme and rename the theme that you want as ‘default’ (I thought that’s a really clever solution. I did that and got a blank screen instead)

So in the end, I reloaded my Kubrick as default. Better to have an unpretty theme than a blank screen. I even tried upgrading my theme to the latest version and tried uploading WP2.3.3 compatible themes. Nope, none of them works.

I’ll be eternally grateful if you have a solution for me. Meanwhile, I’ll just got to make do with Kubrick for the time being.

24/02 update: Finally! My theme problem has been resolved by changing to another wordpress 2.3 compatible theme that I like, and by naming the folder as default. Well, I sure missed the SuperAdsense theme but this theme is just as good!

Tags: wordpress theme problem