In the early days of my Project Wonderful trial, a web site owner declared to me that it was far superior to Adsense, which surprised me greatly. For the first few days of my trial, Project Wonderful was breathing down the neck of my Adsense earnings. In the wee hours of the morning on February 5, Project Wonderful took the lead.

And then later that evening, Adsense re-took the lead and proceeded to leave Project Wonderful in the dust. February was an extraordinarily dismal month for my Adsense earnings—I made about half of what I usually make—and it still brought in twice as much money as Project Wonderful, using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.

March has been a better, but still below average, month for Adsense and so far it’s brought in five times as much money as Project Wonderful, again using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.

So what’s the deal here?

As I said in my first-week review of Project Wonderful,

Project Wonderful is a good choice for small sites who want to make a little side money without much effort…

You put the code on your web site and start earning pennies almost immediately, regardless of how much traffic you have. But even at a mere hundred page views a day (which is the range for most of my web sites), you will do much better by optimizing for Adsense.

And I think therein lies the key difference between that other webmaster and me. Whereas I’ve been building web sites professionally and semi-professionally for nearly ten years, know how to optimize for search engines and have partially optimized my sites for Adsense, she mainly got into blogging to support a hobby and decided to throw some ad code on a web page to try to make a little money. She’s not a coder or template designer.

So if you already know a bit about web design and like to get down-and-dirty with your code, do a little research on Adsense optimization and set your site up for Adsense. If you’d rather leave the code alone as much as possible, throw a Project Wonderful block or two or three up on your site and watch the pennies roll in.

Or do both—optimize for Adsense, but re-route the ad money from Project Wonderful into advertising your own site. That just might get you the biggest bang for your buck.

Knitblogging is huge on the web and there is a serious shortage of knitting-themed blog templates. So this theme is for the knitters!

Demo/Download: (Updated March 5, 2008)
Terms of Use

• 2-column version: live demo | .zip file (153K)
• 3-column version: live demo | .zip file (164K)

To install, extract the .zip archive and upload to your themes directory.

Although this Wordpress theme is free for personal/non-commercial use, if you like it, please consider making a donation in support of the time and effort that went into the design. Thank you!

I have made some changes to the A Taste of Spring Wordpress theme—I’ve added some comments that should help you find your way around when tweaking and also a print stylesheet. Download the updated .zip files on the theme details page.

I’ve also added a special feed just for new Wordpress themes.

The complete Pointy Sticks theme should go up at the end of the weekend.