A quick look at the list of Jim Howard‘s interests is innocuous enough at first, until you reach item number eight: nudity. As the site’s tagline so neatly states, Jim is from Missouri, words aren’t enough, you’ve got to show me.
However, aside from a semi-nude cam photo in the top left corner of the site (nude from the waist down, mind you), there isn’t an awful lot of skin outside of the photo galleries. The blog is a mildly diverting read; currently a lot of time is spent discussing the site’s eventual move to a new url, and the problems Jim is having securing a domain name. The content is often relatively personal – no grievance sharing, plenty of familial discussion – though it reads well and the author pays attention to his spelling and grammar, which certainly helps.
Unfortunately, one thing Jim has apparently not devoted much time to is the site’s design. In IE it is passably average, in Netscape a little less so. The masthead is a poorly optimised jpeg with red text on blue that blurs more and more the harder you try to read it.
The site is a three column affair, though a little more organisation would help with the placement of links – one column devoted to external links, one to navigation, would make far more sense. So too would having a proper archive: there is a calendar view of September, though it is impossible to select a different month to view so trawling through older posts is a cumbersome and involved process of selecting the last entry and clicking the link to the previous one each time.
There is a reason to come back to the site; many reasons, perhaps. The author and his family are moving house, and are saving to do so. The struggle to save money is well communicated, so too the search for a new home, and how different family members treat the process. With any luck, Jim will find time to redesign after the move(s); a change could do this site some good, but until then, at least it’s easy enough to read everything that happens in September.