About templates size

[Mickey]

Hello,

There are lots of templates existing for IndexU, but I have never seen an explanation about the size and the number of the columns and other parts of these templates.

I use Adsense ads, and these ads have standard sizes. I was obliged to modify and adapt a part of my templates to the size of the ads, but I'm sure that if somebody proposed templates especially made for Adsense, they would have success.

The size of Adsense and "thematic Adsense" are here :
https://www.google.com/adsense/static/fr/AdFormats.html

I tried lots of sizes, and I saw that 160x600 and 468x60 (with text, not with graphic banners) are the most successful.
The left column is the best place to put Adsense.

So, is it possible to propose a template with just 2 columns :
- the left column with a width of 160 pixels (but 200 is also possible)
- the main column 468 pixels wide.

200 + 468 = 668. So, it's possible to make 210 + 570 = 780 pixels.

The rows of "browse. html", "detail.html", "row.html" etc. must be adapted to these sizes.

For "commercial" sites, visitors don't care of the pagerank block. They very rarely use the "Tell a friend" block (I tested it with the add-on described yesterday).

A "diy" small block could be useful : I created one empirically (block.php and block.html), to include "simple text" without algorithms.

Good luck to the people how will create (and sell ?) such a template

[Bruceper]

Templates/skins are a cost vs time measure. You can take a template and modify it for indexu use but how many are you going to sell? How much time is it going to take?

If it takes 8 hours, first you determine how much to pay yourself, lets use $15 per hour. So your template cost you $120 without a cost to buying the template in the first place to modify into indexu use. But for now assume the origional template cost was $0.

Marketing, domain cost, hosting (sure you can use a domain you already own, and a host you already have), more time answering questions, support, payment system integration, license issues (monitoring, permissions), user control panel, and so much more.

Add it all up and it's not cheap to just start out. Then figure that you have to sell your skins at $35-50 to make a profit because the sales volume is probably low. Many users won't pay that kind of a price for a skin.

As for blocks, they are very easy to make. Really all you have to do is copy one that exists and rename it (externally and internally) and it's done.

For the templates that already exist from nicecoder, most of them are two column and are around 550px for the main column and 230 for the side column.

You're right that many people don't care about page rank, so remove the block from your site. The tell a friend block is also commonly unused so you can remove that too. It's very easy to remove blocks, just comment them out.

Further to column widths, you can change them easily in the code.