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Site Design for Adsense - Dark Themes versus Light Themes

Has anyone got any opinions or experience using light or dark site designs?

bouncybunny

11:22 am on Jul 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

Obviously, we all design our websites for users and not for Adsense. With that in mind, I'm at the early stages of re/designing one of my sites.

In the past I've generally defaulted to a design with a white background, with black text and then blended my ad units accordingly.

But, for the first time, I'm considering having a dark background, with 'whiteout' text.

Now, I've had a look at Google's suggestions here and they are interesting. [google.com...]

But I wonder if anyone has any personal experience with this. Did you change the way you implemented Adsense on a site with a dark background? Did you do any testing and what results did you have?

netmeg

2:27 pm on Jul 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

As a general rule, I use light backgrounds. That's as much for myself as anyone else - the older I get, the harder my eyes have to work to make out light-on-dark text.

I do have some sites with a dark background, and they've never earned as much as the light background, but there's so many variables, I don't know that I'd blame it on that. Different niches, different focus, different advertisers, etc.

Make it easy for your visitors to read. That's my $.02.

bouncybunny

2:33 am on Jul 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks netmeg.

It's interesting the accessibility issue, I've generally read that white out of black is easier to read on screen. Yet, it's not so popular. But perhaps white text out of other colours is the issue?