GigaOM.com is a popular tech blog with what I think is currently the most common layout for a blog that is ad heavy. Ad heavy is not a bad thing. You have to pay your bills somehow and there is a right way and a wrong way to put ads on your site that meets the two most important goals with ad placement - generating revenue and not annoying the hell out of your readers.
GigaOM’s layout is a simple wide body, three column setup with two sidebars, one 300px and one in the range of 160px to 180px. I say “range” for the thinner sidebar because there is no standard in this particular layout across the board. As long as there is enough space to stack a 160×600 skyscraper ad in there, a few pixels here and there don’t make much difference. The fat sidebar is almost always 300px in this type of layout. The fat sidebar supports big block ads of 300×250 and it also does well with those 125px block ads that are everywhere right now.
How do you get this semi-standard popular three column layout with Shifter? This type of sidebar layout that I call “mid-fat” will work better with wider width pages. Shifter body width settings of 950px, 974px or 100% fluid will work well. For purposes of this example, I will use a body width of 950px.
From your Shifter Settings page in your Wordpress admin panel under Presentation, set your first sidebar setting to “Sidebar right 300px”. Set your second sidebar to “66/33″. Set your sidebar shift order to “Standard”. Setting the shift order to “Alternate” flips the deafault look of Shifter for new visitors from the standard shift order. The ability to change the default shift order doubles the amount of possible setups for your site.
This is a shot of Shifter with the common wide body layout of left content with two right sidebars, one mid-width and one fat using the “headless” skin that ships with Shifter.
That’s how easy things are with Shifter. In two or three clicks from the settings page, you can achieve virtually any common, functional layout for your site. Let us know if you have any questions about Shifter or suggestions for the next layout example.
Tags: shifter, Themes, web-design, websites, Wordpress
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