Rejected For Ad-Sense

I decided the other day to sign up to Google's Ad-Sense program as I wanted to see if I could earn a few extra pennies having relevant advertising on my blog posts.

Unfortunately the email came back from Google today that I have been rejected as I have difficult site navigation.

Now this is something I've suspected for a while, but didn't want to admit to. Reading the email wounded my pride, but it's also been a good reality check.

I have juggled the navigation over the past few months, but kept the basic theme the same so as not to orphan too much content.

Maybe now is the time to embrace a brave new design. The trouble is, I'm not really a designer.

I can find what I want on the site as I know where it is, and how the site is structured. Looking at the usage of the site however reveals most the impressions are referred to from my RSS feeds, or from search engines. There is very little movement on the site once a reader has arrived, though the related links box on some posts seems to be popular.

The content people actually use are the blog entries. This makes sense, as it's mainly old legacy stuff that's not included in the blog, everything else is there. I think it's probably time to make the blog the real focus of the site. Also, judging by my inbox, adding the ability to comment on posts would also be a good thing.

It's time to look at some good A list blogs, and see what they are doing right, and where I'm going wrong.

Expect changes over the coming few months...