CTR Potential vs Visual Aesthetics

I am just about finishing up on my new niche sites.

There is only ONE other site doing what I am doing. That site is run by some random guy and its just a 10 page site that he whipped together in probably a few days using a 45$ theme forest generic portfolio/magazine theme.

He has 2 pages ranked on the top 10 so the competition is fairly weak.

All other sites are weak e-commerce, forums or yahoo answers

My site was originally made purely for adsense but I actually found a few e-commerce sites offering affiliate programs for the products I promote. (amazon doesnt sell this stuff)

Im using the theme prosense


After briefly scanning other themes I noticed even with the twenty fourteen theme I could make my site so much more crisp and visually appealing but its not designed for adsense, however you can stick adsense on anything I suppose.


For people that have done this before what makes more money? High CTR themes that look lame or crisp appealing themes with poorly optimized adsense?

I think part of the question you're going to need to ask yourself is how do *you* see this site going? Are you building a niche site aimed at ranking a few specific keywords and earning off of those, or do you plan on expanding this into an authority presence. An ugly site isn't going to build trust with viewers, but if you're looking for people to get one-time visitors who are more likely to click your ads, you'll want to make them more "front and center" (obviously without violating TOS).

A good option if you're looking to play the best of both worlds is to use in-content ads (there are WP plugins to help with this). They somewhat help combat ad blindness, and tend to offer the best CTR out of the aesthetically pleasing options.