James is a 15 year old living in Melbourne, Australia; his blog is rather modestly titled imperfection. When you first access the site, you see a picture of the owner, which I can only describe as rather blah. On the sidebar, you see all the bells and whistles you expect from bloggers who adopt these little site tweaks in a relatively indiscriminate fashion. Bashing personal sites always makes me feel a little guilty, especially when they’re written by bloggers as young as James. Unfortunately, there’s very little about this site that compels me to recommend it.
James’ youth is made glaringly obvious in many of the entries; his sense of humour at times borders on the puerile. While it’s perfectly normal for a fifteen year old to find guys dancing to Lady Marmalade funny, I somehow couldn’t find it in me to laugh with him; not without a video of the event, anyway. James’ life and his thoughts on it also seem fairly predictable. His entries on his crushes, homework or social life really didn’t draw very much of a reaction from me – I just couldn’t find it in me to care. There’s just very little original content in this site, and very little to draw new readers in. On top of this, James has a whole category of his blog dedicated to quiz results; in my opinion, the frequency of online quizzes is often inversely proportional to the quality of the blog. After reading through the blog (and finding myself falling asleep), I feel my suspicion holds true.
I’ve never liked the modblog template; the archives are difficult to access, the three-column design makes the site feel a little too cluttered for my taste, and the fact that they are, apparently, not that customizable just makes them feel like they’re a tad too uniform. Imperfection is no exception to this rule. In fact, all the added features in his sidebars leave his blog feeling like a refugee camp for has-been online fads.
While I’m sure that James is a fine young man, his blog leaves a lot to be desired, especially if he’s hoping to catch the attention of an unforgiving internet audience. I’m sure that as James’ writing skills improve, his blog will improve as well. However, at the moment, I find his blog a little hard to read, and a lot harder to like.
All in all, therefore, to call this site imperfection is a bit of an understatement, given its many flaws. Given James’ youth, I hope his next foray into the blogging world fares a little better than this one.DWX – James’ Blog