Wordpress Theme Shifter Series Release 2: Shifter 950-300

Todays release of Shifter is one of the most popular current layouts for blogs. Shifter is released today in a 950px wide version with a 300px AJAX shifting sidebar. (Learn more about the idea behind Shifter)

Demo And Download

Demo this version of Shifter here. Download from the Shifter page.

Release 2: Shifter 950-300

This version of Shifter defaults to a wide sidebar on the right that accomodates most of the common standard ad formats of the day perfectly. The theme is shown with a block of 125px square ads that are everywhere in the blogoshphere. The sidebar has two distinct widgetized columns. One of the sidebar columns supports a skyscraper ad of up to 160px wide.

As I said, this is the current layout du jour on many high profile blogs like TechCrunch and ProBlogger to name a few. I’m not a fan of the huge skyscraper ads in the sidebar combined with the 125px block ads because it seems to destroy the layout of the sidebar. But when it comes to monetizing your blog, you have to put food on the table anyway you can. A solid ad block of 300px in place of the 125px blocks keeps the continuity of the sidebar but four advertisers on a 125px ad block will probably bring in more than a single advertiser with a 300px ad block.

Of course this version of Shifter continues to allow the user to establish the layout with the shifting user controlled sidebar location.

Release Notes And Licenses

The theme contains no sponsored links or malware, it does contain one of our links because we designed it. If you don’t want the link there, take it out. If you take it out, we would at least like you to drop us a note so we could see the theme in action. We may start a showcase or gallery of Shifter at some point. Part of the code is based on the Yahoo! YUI, which is an incredible libary of user interface tools for developers.

Shifter is Wordpress 2.3 good to go. It will also work on all of the lower versions of Wordpress 2.x.

Tags: shifter, Themes, Wordpress