Theme review: Acosmin Monetized Theme

Every week or so, I review a monetized theme I have set up on a blog I either manage or personally contribute to. Today I am review the theme Acosmin. The theme was created initially for the website Acosmin.Com. The author did an excellent job making smooth clean layout that is excellent for monetization purposes. This is a free blog, and you must keep his link in the footer. It is a small link though, and shouldn’t concern many. I have switched to this theme for my personal website. I will be modifying it as I go however.

Right out of the box, this three column theme has in place the code for advertisements. They do a good job within the code of explaining which box is set up for which type of ad. Along the left sidebar column there is placement for up to four 125 x 125px ads. This is excellent for selling those spaces because it is very high profile. On the right side bar is a perfectly placed 300 x 250px space for Google Adsense. It is excellent for CTR and, if you content is crawled correctly, will display excellent ads for your site. In the header, there is a spot dedicated for a 468×60 ad banner. If your website is generating decent traffic, this will be a highly lucrative spot.

The color scheme is very professional, it is a smooth grey and very earth tones. The layout features a lot of nice icons and rounded corners. The blog is highly monetized but it really doesn’t feel like it. When you click on individual blog posts, it keeps the same format without adding any additional Adsense ads. This is a good feel for those who want to have a nice website without looking too Adsense dependent.

There are a several things that bothered me about this layout. I added it to a blog that was receiving a ton of traffic and the users of that blog pointed out several bugs. The first and most glaring one is that when you try to comment a post, you are limited with how long you can make your email. I had to modify this in the PHP code AND the style.css and it took me a few shots. Once I fixed it, I was happy. But if you are creating a blog straight out of the box, this could be a real downside.

Another thing that always bothers me about layouts like this is they leave their logo and make you edit it. In the style.css file, they block the title from displaying in the header. This is fine if you are good with graphics, but if you aren’t, as soon as you switch themes in the Presentation section of Wordpress you’ll notice their logo. You have to remove the JPG and create your own. This is a pain to me.

Overall, this theme is a great solution for those who want to monetize their blog. You do need to have a good feel for editing PHP and using Wordpress, but if you do, you will love this layout.