Stripe ads are a neat way to extend screen real estate to create additional advertising room. They are extremely popular with high traffic websites and are extremely visible to the website visitor since they are the first thing the visitor sees on the site.

A stripe ad is a strip of highlighted ad adspace right below the browser's navigation. Sites that have stripe ads include www.cellphonenews.com, and www.engadget.com.

As you can see, the reason they are so effective is because they are right at the top of the site, almost integrated with the browser's navigation. So, they are not (at least yet) subject to visitor blindness so often associated with banner ads at the top of websites.

To integrate a stripe ad for your website, you can get a branded plugin for your Wordpress theme from certain Wordpress plugin developers or you can roll your own! In this blog post, I show you how you can roll your own. [To get the link to the full report, you must subscribe to my RSS.]

Why do you want to roll your own? Because:

1. It is free!
2. You don't have to keep a visible link to the plugin developer's website (e.g. "Powered by XXXX") since that looks amateurish.
3. You get to understand how xhtml and php works so you can custom tailor your stripe ad to your website needs.

Getting Started

You should know a little bit of how to write html and CSS. If not, follow the steps below and just do a Google search for parts you don't understand.

Step 1 - Create a new "div"

Add the following div and message to each page you want the stripe ad to appear:

<div id="stripe-ad-top">[INSERT MESSAGE HERE]</div>

If you are using Wordpress or another blogging system, you can just add the div to the appropriate template file once and it will appear on all pages.

Step 2 - Modify your CSS file or style sheet

Modify your CSS or style sheet to add in the following styles:

[Subscribe to my RSS to get the link to the full report with all the codes.]

Step 3 - Modify your webpages for Internet Explorer

Because IE6 and below is not generally standards compliant with W3C guidelines, you have to enter the follow fix for IE:

Put this at the very top of each page (again, it is easier to just paste this into your templates):

Useful Blogger Help & Blogspot Support Resources

Want to contact Google Blogger Support directly ? Or report a bug in Blogger ? Here are some relatively unknown but very important pages on blogger.com for anyone using blogspot:

www.blogger.com/changes10.g - Dynamic list of most recently updated blogs hosted on Blogger.com [like Digg Spy]

www.blogger.com/login.g - A simple no-frills page to sign-in to your Blogger account.

www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra - To visit any random blog hosted on blogspot.com [something like Stumble Upon]

help.blogger.com/?page=wishlist - This is the place to go when you like to make a suggestion to blogger about new features or vote for existing features.

www.blogger.com/forgot.g - When you forget your Blogger password or even the username, this is all you need.

help.blogger.com/?page=help - The secret page to contact blogger when you have a problem with your blogspot blog. People are not using this much but believe me, the blogger team at Google is very responsive and do listen to your complaints.

google.com/group/blogger-help - This google group is monitored by employees of google working on Blogger. This is one place you should visit very frequently to get an update on new blogger template ideas, suggestions, issues, etc.

help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py - List of known bugs or issues in the Blogger platform and possible workarounds.

Blogger Templates - Resources for free blogspot templates.

Hide Blogspot Navbar - How to remove the blogger navigation bar.


Useful Blogger Help from Digital Inspiration

The tool below will help you format a feed's display with the information you want to use on your web site. All you need to enter is the URL for the RSS source, and select the desired options below.

http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php

Go to the link and add you info, and preview the script. You can also choose a theme.

Note: you must use RSS web address.

My sample on www.politicalwatchmalaysia.blogspot.com