Hi Everyone,

I always like to get opinions on my web site. I started this website approximately one year ago plus. It's a children's educational website, but a little bit left of center. I've been very lucky with it so far, but am always open to comments.....

Here it is! Captain Bootsie Bear's Magic Time Portal To Adventure

Thanking you in advance!

Cpt B Bear

Oh I don't know were to start, this is going to sound so negative.

Besides the animated GIFs and music that would normally mean I would not look twice at the site, along with it having everything almost randomly placed any where it has almost 600 errors to make the HTML invalid (on the hope page I did not look much further than that). The site does not look like it has had the effort put in to make it a quality site, so I don't see why anyone would want to put the effort in to posting a good review. I am sure that reason is a lack of still and time, which not everyone has so please don't take this in an offensive way as I am sure you have tried hard and put much time into it.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the feedback. I always take comments in a positive way. There has been a lot of time and effort put into the site. It's just different than most and it's been rewarded with a few site awards. But 30,000 visitors a month and over 60% returning, I guess I must be doing something right. I've be number 1 on Google and Yahoo or at least in the top ten for the past year consistently.

Thanks for your comments. Keep then coming...My door and mind is always open!

Cpt B Bear

I think you are asking the wrong audience for a review here. Most of us who frequent these forums are coders. We look at things like validation (which yours oh so miserably fails) and coding. From a professional standpoint (in appearance), your website has a long way to go. Dark background, difficult to read text coloring, apparently random image and text placement. You have images placed over text and text placed over images. Its just hard to fathom.

#1 on google and yahoo is a quite meaningless statistic depending on what search terms you look for. If I search for "Geeks To Go" on yahoo or google, I will find that this site is #1 and has been for quite some time. If I search for "Captain Bear" or "Bootsie", I cant even find your website, however if I search for Captain Bootsie Bear Magic", its #1. Its no surprise.

Regardless of that or how many rewards your site has won, it really has nothing to do with a review of the site which you requested. Michael and I found your site difficult to read, oddly laid out, and significantly lacking in good code. Thats not meant to be mean, but thats how we see it.

Now, I started out saying that you were asking the wrong audience and you are. If you ask a class of 5th grade kids what they think of your website, they may give a very different review. You may indeed get a stellar review from those kids.

I believe that you want to keep your site light and fun for kids, as I believe thats your target demographic. However you can accomplish this task while also keeping with good site design parameters (and without the black background and hard to read texts).

Take this site for instance (just found it via google). http://www.kidsreads.com/ Its well laid out, easy to read, function, and still fun. It also loads in 1/16th the time that your site does. Good code is essential not only for proper display cross-browser, but also to help decrease load times.

I wish you luck, you obviously have a passion for what you are doing and you have something interesting to offer. Like Michael, I do not mean to be negative, but I am just being honest.

i have to agree with the two reviews above me.
with the back ground and all those gifs i feel like im looking at website from a decade ago.
it thing if you have that many visitors you should have a
"website redesign contest"
and make it open to your guests and offer to give them credit for the redesign. thats bound to interest someone

you did old school coding. have you been reading tutorials that still say netscape is an awesome browser?.

criticism:

-layout
on a y2k standard its aceptable.

-the music?
one of the first things i learned as far as flash mx background music goes, is never ever put music on a website without giving your viwer a way to turn it off! people have different music taste.

-oh the gifs
um what can i say, hi? are you learning to code html from a teacher in a third world country? i mean thats what they teach you. there are very few places where gifs are aceptable, one is the favicon.

i recommend you take a look at lynda's dreamweaver beyond the basics. it teaches a good deal of css but cuts short on divs.

And on that note I won't even open the link because I am sure I'll add exactly what Michael and ScHwErV added....

Sadly, I have to agree with most of the criticisms already made of this site. The design looks very amateurish to me. The animated GIFs are just plain annoying - I might have been able to live with just the one tucked away discretely in a corner but six or more of them on your index page.

Having said all that if you find that your site is reaching its target audience you must be doing something right. Nevertheless it would be worth the effort making your code more standards compliant even if you dont want to change the look and feel. And remember to test it out with a range of browsers. In FF1.5 Captain partially obscures some images.