Here is a method that is helping AdSense publishers increase their click-thru rate (CTR), and ultimately generating more revenue. If you have not seen this technique yet, then you can view a live example on one of my websites that I use for testing Adsense theories.

I am not allowed to release my exact CTR numbers, but after adding these icons next to my Large Rectangle (336×280) ads, I saw an increase in my CTR percentage by 4-6 perecent. The reason for the large variation in the percentages is that, like with most sites, certain days of the week result in more or less traffic. Either way, even an increase of 2% would be something to talk about.

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Well, I did it. I decided to buy vBulletin today. On top of that, I ordered vBSEO as well. I’m trying to figure out what exactly I want the forums to be about, and it definately isn’t an easy thing.

I guess the hardest part is coming up with the categories. I can literally organize it a thousand different ways, and I must have edited the titles a hundred times already. The hard part is that you don’t want to get so focused on every subject, but at the same time, it makes it much easier in terms of navigation.

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Well, I’ve run into a couple of setbacks with the redesign. All of them have to do with the backend. The frontend of things is pretty much set. There’s some minor things I want to add, like some images and some hidden features that aren’t available in this screenshot.

To be honest, I don’t think a blog is the best setup for divspace. It’s doing the job for now, but in the near future I’ll be writing my own backend to handle the needs of the site and to turn my vision into a reality.

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I guess I should have made this my first post, but thought I would have come up with a design faster than this. Yes, the divspace logo looks just like Digg’s logo. Yes, the gradient header looks just like theirs too. And yes, even the search form mimics theirs.

Can I design? After all, this is a website about web development, which would include web design. And granted there aren’t any articles about web design yet, I can design.

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I decided to make a tag cloud for WordPress today, but with a twist. Most of the tag clouds I see were category tag clouds, meaning they were based on the number of posts in a category. I don’t really have enough categories yet to do something like this though. Instead, this is more of a keyword or post tag cloud.

This kind of cloud tag makes a little more sense to me, at least from the perspective of a visitor. They can, in one quick view, tell exactly what you talk about in your blog posts. I also made it so visitors can click on any of the tags and it will use the built-in search engine to find posts with whatever word they clicked on.

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I do a lot of experimenting with another website of mine that I manage, so I have learned through trial and error what works and what does not. One of the easiest ways to increase your click-thru rate (CTR) is to choose the right ad unit sizes for your website.

I used to think that the Leaderboard (728×90), Banner (468×60), and the Wide Skyscraper (160×600) ad units were the best ones to use, but after doing some research and looking at my own results, the opposite is true.

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Now we’re starting to get into the heart and soul of CSS, which would be positioning, or how a box relates to the rest of the page and elements. Over the next three tutorials I’m going to be talking about the different position types, but this one is going to be about relative positioning. This kind of positioning follows the normal flow rules, the only difference is that the box can be moved according to its offset properites.

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