For the last couple of weeks one of our tasks was to redesign the front page of Wikidot. The goal was to make it clear, simple, informative and easy to navigate. As always. After a couple of iterations and designs that have never seen the daylight, we would like to show you a "sneak peek preview" of how the main page of Wikidot will look like within a few weeks. We are planning to change the design simultaneously with the introduction of paid services (more information later).

The preview is currently available at testtheme.wikidot.com, our temporary testing site.

We are still working on the content, so please do not take it as final. But we really would like to share our vision with you and hear your opinions and suggestions!

Today we are introducing a feature that has been suggested by many users who either use our AdSense integration or are looking into it. Just a word to those who are not familiar with it: we are allowing our users to put AdSense ads on their pages and we share revenue with them. This is done through AdSense API, a program from Google that makes such integration a piece of cake. When you are using AdSense with Wikidot, Google pays you directly based on the number of clicks in your ads and some other "magic" factors.

Anyway, the problem some of you have is:

• You want to display ads on your Wikis and earn money. This is obvious.
• You do not want to discourage regular users and members by exposing to ads. This is especially important on community wikis, forums etc.

We have performed a study on a selected number of sites. Our solution, very simple, is that now you can display AdSense ads only to users without a Wikidot.com account (aka anonymous users). Why can this benefit you?

• Some of the Wikidot users appreciate the fact that Wikidot is ad-free by default. Most likely they would also appreciate your Wiki as ad-free too, especially if it is a community site, like a forum.
• Regular users do not click ads — this is called ad blindness. If they visit your site often, at some point they simply ignore the ads.
• So you are not likely to make much money from them at all (our study shows that on average only 5% of clicks come from registered users).
• On the other hand your regular users can contribute vastly to the number of pageviews, up to 80-90% on community sites like forums.
• This together makes your ad perform terribly in terms of click per impression ratio (CTR).
• Anonymous users, that come from search engines (like Google) contribute about 50% to the total number of visits. Anonymous users generate up to 90% of earnings today on some wikis.
• By disabling ads for your regular users you can improve performance of your ads and (magically!) this can vastly improve you total earnings.

So the most important benefits of displaying ads to the anonymous users only are:

• Browsing your Site is now nicer for registered users (no ads).
• Improve performance of your ads (if you are lost in our explanation above, just try this).
• Can improve your overall earnings!

We highly recommend setting this option to everyone. In fact, the ads are being displayed to anonymous users only by default now. If you do not like it, you can change it back. Simply go to the AdSense panel and click on configure wikis, but please give it a try for a while.

If you are deep into AdSense, probably you already know that many services are using such an distinction between visitors with very good results.

If you have never used our AdSense options, now there is one more reason to try it. Your regular users will not be exposed to ads, so they should not mind at all, but you could get some nice pocket money!

Links:

• Wikidot + AdSense explained
• AdSense management panel
• moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus — we are happy to answer any questions!

Hi all Wikidottians,

Wikidot would be nothing without The Users and The Community. We appreciate every part of the co-operation, i.e. community-based HOWTOs and FAQ, partnership in promoting Wikidot etc.

Today we would like to present a beautiful example of users' engagement in Wikidot's life — Wikidot Video Tutorial. One of our users: samoore created couple of videos in which he describes how to start work with Wikidot step-by-step. This is a very useful guide especially for those who have just created an account and/or new wiki site.