In this post I will describe the process I went through to choose the colors of the AdSense Ad Unit at the bottom right of this page. To get it exactly the way I want, it involved looking at the CSS for WordPress theme I’m using. I will discuss the Style Sheet for WordPress templates/themes in a later post, so hopefully this won’t be too complex. It is still possible to get what you need without looking at the CSS for the exact colors, and I will try and exaplain them in a later post.
Deciding what the Ad must look like:
If you take a look on the left of this page, you should see 2 boxes containing a title and a list of links, namely “Pages” and “Categories”. This is the standard menu structure for my blog, so I’ve decided that, to enable my ads to blend in a little better with my site, I want them to look similar to this. According to Google’s T&C, visitors must be able to distinguish the ads from the rest of my site’s content, and you’ll see that this is still done because of the “title” “Ads by Goooogle” at the top of the Ads. So I have chosen the SkyScraper ad unit.
Deciding on the Ad’s Colors:
Once again, if you look at the menus on the left, you will see that the Heading of the menu is Blue, and the links underneath are Red (or Orange, I can’t really tell :-D). In an ad unit, there are generally 5 parts that you can change the colors of, and you will see what colors I have chosen for each part:
- Border – White, because I will be using my own border as the rest of my menu structure does
- Title – Blue, like the titles of my other menus
- Background – White
- Text – Red
- Url – Red, so that it falls as part of the Text section
Finding the Ad’s Colors:
In my style sheet, if I find where the menu’s formatting is defined, I can see the colors being used are:
- Red = #FF3300
- Blue = #008CD2
The other color I will need is White, which is #FFFFFF.
This all makes life really easy, because, if you see the picture below, when designing the ads in my AdSense account, it’s just a case of entering the colors in the correct Boxes.
