Maximise the Minima Blogger Template

As I have written several times, Minima family is a very usable and clean family of Blogger templates that I have used with a few money making blogs.

It is not especially pretty but at least Minima Lefty gives a decent click rate when you put the Google Ads in the left column of the blog. In the ordinary Minima template the sidebar is on the right side which gives a less than perfect click rate.

If you are looking for something fancier, you might like to try Minibox. It is a three-column-hack of Minima, and I have used a slightly tweaked version of it with one blog.


More AdSense ready blogger templates based on Minima can be found in Mywebquestforu.

If you want to customize Minima to your own taste, you should read some of the tutorials that are available on Internet. For example, Tips for New Bloggers has a useful tutorial for tweaking Minima from the default two columns to a three-column-template.

At the moment, I test a four-column-template based on Minima. This provides plenty of slots where one can add AdSense ads and other marketing stuff like the Amazon product ads you see on the third column.

Another tutorial is provided by Blogger Buster, in the article A Cheat's Guide to Customising Blogger Templates. Those two articles should be more than enough to get you started in customizing the Minima blogger template to your taste.

More tips can be find in the Themes Wiki's section for Blogger. It is a nice introduction to blogger templates and you might well like to print the page for reading off-line. And if you want to do some more serious Blogger hacking, you'll find a nice collection of hacks in the Bloganol.com.

As you see, even the simple Minima can be customized to a great extent. Just try the different tweaks until you are happy with the result! And if you cannot find all the information you need by googling around or using the links above, you should seriously consider buying the Blogger handbook presented to the left.

Choosing an AdSense Optimized Blogger Template

Now that I have kept this blog alive already for a few weeks, I hope there are already some regular readers (I write this three weeks before the day I have programmed this article to be published!). Thus I should at least now be thinking about changing the template from Minima Lefty to something fancier.

Or should I?

In fact I have started to like the template a lot. It is simple and clean, and it lets the reader concentrate on the content. And content should be the most important part of any blog, not the AdSense ads in the margins or between the articles.

On the other hand, if people find it too unattractive they might not bother to read even the first article. They would probably just return to the Google search results and move forward to the next hit. Bad for me. And for my readers.

There are many good templates that claim to be optimized for AdSense. At least they are designed to look good and they have nice places ready for ads. But are they really optimized in the sense that they give higher click-rates? So far I have not found any conclusive analysis or comparison made between different free blogger templates. And I do not intend to do such a time-consuming comparison at the moment myself. I need my time for other, more important things. Like for writing this and several other blogs.

Minima is a very functional theme and I value functionality very high. But do the readers see it in the same way? Does the blog just look plain and boring? Does it look (too) unprofessional?

If the template is too plain or unprofessional, the visitors to blog might just jump to the next Google result and not read a single article of the blog. In this case, they most probably will not click any ads either.

At the moment, I am testing Thisaway Blue. It is one of the default templates available in the Blogger. It's pretty simple but still a bit prettier than Minima.