I've seen some great sidebar designs (like filters for listing pages) and the list or grid to the right of it. My problem is that these seem to only be quite thin and fitting a 300px by 250px MREC advertising space is quite hard (to me) without making the rest of the website fit this in.
How would you work around such space constraints?
Try an ad-before-load setup. So many sites do this, so it would be easy to assume it's OK. Fundamentally an ad-before-load setup is when you display a center-aligned ad before the page loads. A simple way to implement this is to make your links go to the regular sites, but add a script to redirect you to the ad site (Which you pass the URL as a URL variable), unless the URL contains a variable, (Let's say &adViewed), and then add a link to the site that you need to go to (Contained in the URL variable), plus the variable, so the page loads. This ensures that 1: the ad is viewed, and 2: The page remains uncluttered, and clean.
