Your feedback in a minute on this:

But first, I hope the long weekend with Labor Day went well for everybody. We skipped town on Friday under kind of emergency circumstances to help my sister-in-law’s family move. They were supposed to be able to move into a new house, but the signing got delayed and then had to have home moved into storage literally with hours to spare. My sister-in-law has been really sick lately, so that only added to the stress level of the situation. Time to power jam the U-Haul. All seemed to work out well, but we didn’t get back until yesterday afternoon. I didn’t go near a PC — beyond moving theirs — for three days.

What should go in the header banner spot?
This morning I’m reviewing the header section of Hmm and just nuked the banners — perhaps not permanently, but at least for a test period. Those banner ads, love them or hate them, provide about 15% of the revenue of this site but I’m bored with them. And if I’m bored with them, readers probably are too. One thing about advertising on the web is it’s important to shake things up from time to time. For years banners have rotated there and the spot is, well, old. Besides being a manual process to swap them out with new banners, it’s a spot that I think would be better served showing something besides traditional 468×60 ads.

Those with anti-ad plugins aren’t seeing them anyway and new visitors who stop by and see those first could be turned off and not bother visiting the content beyond. It’s all these reasons coupled with the fact that a few of the rotating banners were beyond dusty — like the Father’s Day banners and the Apple store ones that don’t even pay out any more — as well as an email from a reader politely pointing to the dust that prompted me to pull down the banners altogether. While I like having a spot for traditional banners, I think it’s time to drop them from there, at least for a little while, and put something else there. Right now, all you’ll see is empty space or a bolded link to this post.

This is where you come in, friendly, helpful readers. What would you like to see in this spot? I’ve been thinking about this area for awhile and have a few ideas. Let me throw these out:

- links to the most popular posts at Hmm
- the most searched terms at Hmm
- move up the search bar and RSS subscribe options from the sidebar
- rotate Hmm reviews
- rotate Hmmcasts. This is already done in the right sidebar on the single post pages
- showcase a reader’s blog section: share a reader website link every day, week, etc.
- highlight good comment quotes. A bigger make you go hmm style quote with a link to the comment/thread. I’m leaning toward this one at least in the short term.
- some combination of the above, rotating randomly or perhaps even on a daily schedule that changes
- your suggestion

As you can see from the list above, I’m leaning strongly toward making this a content area, not an advertising area any more. I will likely be putting banner ads somewhere else in the design, not removing them entirely. Where, I’m not sure yet, but open to suggestions there as well that are not too reader intrusive. Maybe they stay away and that means less ad space on the pages; that would be a good thing to advertise to readers.

Please share your creative thoughts below or trackbacked in from your blog on what this area should display here. All serious recommendations will be considered. Thank you in advance.

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