A lot of people have been asking for a demo of Artisteer so I made a 7 minute video where I quickly make an artisteer theme. As I mention in the video, it’s hard to go wrong by using artisteer which is why me and Fingerman like it so much. When I first started doing IM I had shitty “adsense optimized themes” that looked terrible and probably the best tip Fingerman gave me was to use artisteer and remove those shitty themes. I can’t say for sure but while many people got banned using adsense and making terrible websites I do think having a nice theme that is user friendly is key. Sure it might not extract the MAXIMUM adsense money you could get but, people might actually enjoy your website and link to it. And google won’t make it their duty to remove your ugly website form their index!
So, basically here’s a few check marks of what I do in artisteer almost all the time. Keep in mind once again these are not necessarily the best. I truly believe as long as you don’t have really weird colors you can’t go wrong in your themes layout so make one that you like.
- Usually only one sidebar, and I often put it to the right.
- White background so it blends with the adsense color panel we like to use. Here’s some of the ways Fingerman likes to configure the colors for his posts/pages as told in our how to start a website post. White background for the posts and pages (This area is described as βArticleβ in Artisteer). Font to Arial and font color to #444444 for posts and pages. Link colors to #000080 (dark blue) in posts and pages.
- Honestly, that’s it. But, I do like to have a short header and I usually add a relevant picture there to make it nice. Everything else is just you making a theme that looks nice to your eyes π
good article alex.
Well without knowing what you do, I must say that all my websites are looking approximately like you described
cool
Which is why I love artisteer π
I must be blind, what are the big differences between the Artisteer theme you created and the current Canvas 2.4 Wootheme you are using?
You mentioned back in feb switching to a wootheme hurt your earnings. Did is screw up your rankings, your ctr, or both?
p.s. thanks for creating such a great informative site
It’s hard to say but the woo theme has some additional functionality and customization that you can’t do in artisteer. Switching to a wootheme slightly lowered my CTR (but not by much) but it was mostly the loss in rankings. Not sure 100% if it was the woothemes or some other weird problems such as having too many links but anyway, I modified the theme on that site and I like it now so I never bothered again.
I’m using Artisteer but having really horrible CTR. I’ve tried a bunch of Ad placements but none seem to work. I had like 1 click in 1000+ pageviews
Is the white background the key?
Can you edit the colors without having to upload a new theme? Will I drop in rank if I switch the theme?
Thanks Alex
I don’t know how to modify the code so I would just upload another theme. Keep in mind your niche is also an important factor in CTR.
by the way any chance of telling us what’s the name of the Plugin you’re using in your sidebar in this site below the About’s?
It’s damn fine π
Artiseer is a nice program for making a decent looking theme, but nothing that’s going to win any design awards. But from experience I have to say that a non-professional blog will usually yield a better CTR than a nicely designed theme. I just use nice looking themes like Thesis for my authority sites to get some return visitors and Artiseer themes for my smaller sites to get max CTR.
That’s the same logic I use :).
Hey, Alex, maybe a bit off-topic,but…
Regarding giving Google fewer reasons to deindex your website.
If you are in a health niche, do you put references to your posts? Like, from where you got that medical information for your posts(otherwise, why would people trust your content, unless you state that you are a legit Doctor or something).
Sometimes I link back to a site if I pulled information form them. Partly because I also think linking out can be a good thing.
Hey Alex, I’m struggling with making a nice category sidebar for my sites…
I don’t know how to make the pages appear nicely on the sidebar
Any plugin or how do you organize your pages/categories ?
I mention that I am using pages instead of posts so how should I organize them in order to look nice ?
You need to use posts in order to have them used in categories. You can easily convert pages to posts by using “p2p” or some addon with that name.
Alex regarding the VPS, i see with my worker that we can’t be together inside, how you deal with it when you want to do something also?
I simply don’t work at the same time as him, or tell him I have to log on for a few minutes.
Hey Alex, I was just wondering about the h1 tag. I don’t think Artiseer has an option for it so I don’t have it as part of the theme for my post titles.
I did it through wordpress and used title for all my post titles.
Now for some reason when I click on individual posts it shows other article titles on top.
IF you click through my website you could probably see it(when you click on a post).
Any tips on how to deal with that?
Thanks a lot man.
Oh yeah, I changed it back without the h1. Its my only site that can make good money haha.
Here’s a site with the same problem- http://seafoodrisottorecipes.com/
Honestly as much as people say the H1 tag is important artisteer never used them for posts so I did not either. It’s not really a big deal, I would not worry about it.
Yeah, I decided to change it back.
Hi Alex,
any idea how to remove those “link1,link2,link3” that comes by default on the footer with artisteer?
From some reason I can’t find it on the code of the editor footer…
thanks in advance!
I tried it right now to remove from one of my sites with a recent artisteer theme and I removed the part that contains the stuff below and the div tags before and after ( I could not paste it all here in the comment because of the html)
php echo do_shortcode(theme_get_option(‘theme_footer_content’));
” from the footer.php
You can actually remove those links or add different links from Artisteer itself. Just go to Footer> click on “Text…” with the letter T icon not the “Text” to change the color. A html box will pop up for you to delete or change any of that text in the footer.
thanks guys …found it!