SITE REVIEW: Jeremy Chase's personal blog

Hey everyone. This is my personal blog, and I'm submitting it here just to get another opinion to make sure it is passable.

Mostly just my mother reads it, but when people google me it comes up.

http://jeremychase.name

Your reviews were a breath of fresh air among the numerous stink clouds I've sifted through by people who have made but 4 posts over the years. I'd like to take the time to do the same for you.

My first thought was "oh boy, a leaderboard made to look like a header". I'd be interested to hear later on how that slot does, I'm thinking a lot of people would assume it's just an odd site header and ignore it past that. Then again, if you don't have a high bounce rate maybe people will click it trying to get to the home page. I guess I've got mixed feelings about that spot, I definately want to know how it does with clickthroughs.

I really like that light green you're using for the background. I don't know about that 1px black(?) border around the content wrapper though, it seems a little fuzzy to me. I think a 2-4px border might look better.

I'm thinking your Adsense skyscraper in the sidebar is off on the background color. It's currently FFFFFF but the containers background is EEEEEE.

I noticed you have a handfull of categories with only one entry. I always groan when I see that. It's a good idea to have at least two items in a category.
One thing I've thought about doing is never creating a category to place a post in, but rather only adding posts to existing categories, then going through posts every few months looking for common subjects that could use their own category. Then creating those categories and adding all of the posts to them at once.

You should take another look at the results of that "Valid XHTML" link.

Joebert,

Thanks for the response.. I guess my blog isn't sexy enough to elicit more feedback.

Do you really think my leaderboard looks like a 'header'? I thought it was obvious that it wasn't part of the site. As a matter of fact I tried to make it look separate. I've seen this tactic on a number of pages. reference: http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1828403

Honestly my 'bounce rate' is pointless since my blog gets so little traffic, and most of what I do get is direct traffic from friends/family. This is a bit by design as I use it for microblogging my life.

I tried playing with the border around the content wrapper, and I like 8px(which if half my whitespace size). Too big? Probably.

I intended to make the adsense background FFF instead of EEE. The thought process was to make the ads pop a little more, and maybe make more people click.

Thank you for the category feedback, I'll try to work on that.

I suppose my blog is a bit of an anomaly because the ads are there really just to see if anyone will click, and not really to try to make any money. It would be fun to get my CPM up, but when you get a thousand pageviews per month it doesn't really matter.

Jeremy