How do you juggle ad placement with usability? There are many guides for raking in ad revenue. Horizontal bars, flashy colors, these will get your ads clicked, but are you sacrificing design for placement? Are you losing potential loyal visitors for click probability?

The first thing to keep in mind is product placement. You’ve seen it happen before on television; your favorite character suddenly cracks open an icy can of Diet Coke ™. Most of the time, product placements go unnoticed. Sometimes however, they can cross the line of irritation.

The same rules apply to web design. There is a healthy medium of adverts and content. This medium depends on a variety of factors. Is your website established? Do you have a solid stream of returning visitors? If so, you can probably afford to be slightly more liberal with adverts. Other wise your potential visitors may take one look at your website and declare it a scam. If your website is well known, people will be more likely accept more ads in exchange for your quality content.

Another ruling factor is the type of ad. Flashy banners, logos, pop-ups, and colorful animations should be used sparingly: no more than 2 per page. Text adverts and clean banners can be used more frequently, although keep in mind they don’t tend to generate as many clicks.

Modern web geeks have a huge role in determining what sites are “cool.” Geeks are tired of advertisements and tend to cling on to communities that don’t plaster themselves with products. That’s right, non-profit is “in.” Not to say yours should be, but it’s still something to keep in mind.

So how do you incorporate advertisements into your design? Don’t try to hard. Making backgrounds and boxes for advertisements will throw your page off even more. Keep advertisements inline with your layout and keep it simple. It’s important for the ad color scheme to match your page, especially if you’re using text ads. The golden rule of ad placement is this: Don’t form content around ads, form ads around content. This means keeping your content and advertisements separate as well. Don’t pepper them into an article, place them at the beginning and end.

I have found that it is best to design a website from the ground up and later decide where the advertisements would be best added to the layout. Usually this makes them least intrusive while still being available to the user.