JazJaz : Site Review

JazJaz.net was the winner of my links competition and his main prize was a permanent review on my site, so I thought it was about time I pulled my finger out and wrote the thing.

The Site

First some background. JazJaz.net is a blog consisting of a multitude of short, pop culture inspired, articles. Many are geeky, many are daft, but all are interesting (to me at least). The reason I picked JazJaz as the winner of the competition was simply that his site had the content I found most enjoyable.

Things I like

1. The content. I know I said it above but the content is great. It's actually almost a tumbleblog style affair but without the mindless nonsense and just the geeky goodness I love
2. The design. I realise the site is built on Wordpress, and I realise it uses a theme which itself is the offspring of two other themes, but the design works well.

Things I would change

1. The design. As I said above I like the design, but I think it could be improved. To improve things I would make two changes. I would switch to a single column format, placing the navigation at the bottom of the page, and I would change the colour of the header. What these changes would do is firstly distance the site from the theme, giving it more of a personality, and it would place more of the focus on the content - and that's the key to a site of this type. Also I would move the (very recently added) Google ads from within the content as I feel they distract from the stuff I am trying to read.
2. More user/ community features. Whilst writing this review I have noticed a myBlogLog widget appear, which is a nice little addition, and other features to encourage commenting would be great eg recent comments or top commentors. Before anyone says anything, I realise that too many of these types of things can be detrimental, but used in a careful way (in moderation) I think they can be a nice addition.
3. Tags - A site like this is the perfect chance to make use of tags for categorising the content. Tags work best when there is a wide variety of different content so would slot in nicely here. If you're going to use tags I think it's better to start sooner rather than later since you really don't want to have to go back and add tags retrospectively - and with Wordpress 2.3 around the corner, there is no better time to start!