Advertising Woes pt.1

As a publishing company, our main source of revenue is advertising. As such, we are usually required to cram as much ad space into the top of our sites (or “above the fold” (I’ll post my personal thoughts on the “fold” in the future)) as possible, often to the detriment of the design. This problem has once again reared it’s ugly head as the Webuser build nears completion – the powers that be need a leaderboard at the top of the site. Here are some of the options explored so far…

I can’t show you the Webuser designs yet so I’ve used Cycling Weekly for this example as the layout is similar. Here’s how the site looks at the moment, complete with a false banner:

First thoughts might be to replace the banner with the leaderboard, leaving the classifieds team with the option of selling either a banner or a leaderboard (as opposed to both). Sounds simple enough, but this doesn’t leave much room for the logo:

The site’s branding becomes completely dominated by the leaderboard as the size of the logo has to be reduced. Bear in mind also that there is little control on exactly what a leaderboard will look like when you’re filling them with classified adverts, so the result could be even worse once you get some nice bright flashing colours in there! Next option is usually to move the entire site down and put the leaderboard at the top:

Just plonking it in the centre, as above, makes me uncomfortable though. It feels like an afterthought (which in this case it sort of is!), is out of alignment with the rest of the site and thus ruins any sense of grid spacing. Other options then would be to align it to the left or right – which would leave us with an empty space to one side. We could perhaps use this space as some kind of promo area to some feature of the site. Whilst this is a sound idea, it still has it’s pitfalls.

In this arrangement we run the risk of affecting or complicating the branding by placing a related promo box directly above the logo. This option is acceptable as long as the contents of the promo is handled in such a way as to not confuse the logo.

Here we could have the same problem with having an ad directly above the logo, which could potentially be anything. Add to this the complete seclusion of the promo between two ads. This arrangement has actually been used on one of the Southbank team’s websites: Woman & Home. Surely the promo box here will suffer greatly from ‘ad blindness’ and be regularly ignored by users assuming it’s simply another advert. The header section of Woman & Home also features a newsletter sign up box on the right under the promo – I can’t help but feel this gives a sense of fragmentation to the header section.

A brief google search on the matter yielded no results, but I’m going to look into this in more as I’m going to need an elegant design solution to this as I know it will be an occurring problem with every redesign…