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Making a new website - Feedback appreciated
shmokes:
--- Quote from: drventure on July 31, 2011, 12:19:24 am ---
There aren't many games for win98 that I can run successfully on Win7.
--- End quote ---
That's true. Plus, the apps are platform specific, so if I switch to an Android or Windows 8 tablet down the road, I can't read the books I've purchased on the new devices. Paper books are only platform specific in terms of being only written in one language (actually a limitation many apps do not share). And it's probably pretty unlikely that at one point down the road you will stop speaking English.
With that said, though, it's not much of a limitation. They're a great value, generally priced between $1 and $4, and they're super coonvenient. Plus, they can be superior to their paper-based counterparts. The iPad remake of the classic Monster at the End of this Book is amazing, and far, far better than the dead-tree original could ever be. All the Dr. Seuss treatments (there are more than 20) improve upon the paper versions as well, though not as dramatically. Cheap, convenient (I'm writing this post on my iPad, and thus am currently holding in my hand my entire library of more than 100 children's books), high quality products made for a huge market of people who have disposable income (parents with iPads), are sure to sell well. :)
shmokes:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on July 30, 2011, 12:37:25 pm ---
Also in regards to the "split blog" style where you put two links on the same row. I realize your site is for childrens books and it isn't the same audience, but they updated kotaku's site with that style and the users revolted until they put in an option to use the old blog style.
--- End quote ---
I think you're right. It's switched back to a single column now. I think the way I had it looks nice from a design perspective, but it's not as usable. It's better now.
shmokes:
The point is to monetize the site. I'd love to make a name for myself with the site and have Best Kid become a huge name in children product reviews, but that's not so much a goal as a, "That'd be awesome if . . ." The goal is simply to increase the search rankings of this site and have it generate a nice chunk of extra revenue for something that doesn't take too much of my time. I don't think that I could leverage this into a real job because I'm not looking for jobs in any remotely related market.
I think your instincts about parents behavior are pretty off the mark. What led me to get into this was that for almost the entire time I had the iPad there was no decent resource for sifting through the hundreds of kids books available on the app store. Parents, you'll be surprised to know, do not base their concern about the development of their children solely on economics. I want my daughter to have good books and good toys and see good movies and shows. I want her to have fun. I want her to learn. I want these things, even when the stuff I'm buying her is inexpensive. Almost all parents do. In fact, they get pretty fanatical about it.
User reviews on the app store are utterly worthless. Most of the people on the app store have no frame of reference because they only own maybe one or two kids books apps. So they're like, "Oh, this is pretty cool. Five stars," when actually it's comparative garbage. Also, most the one star reviews are statistical outliers because they're just random instances of someone downloading an app only to have the app be completely non-functional on their device. That person would otherwise be disinclined to voice their opinion. But EVERY person with a defective product is inclined to voice his opinion. I've purchased a ---steaming pile of meadow muffin----ton of books on the app store that had 4.5 star ratings and almost invariably they're crap. I think it likely that I'm not alone.
edit: typo
shmokes:
--- Quote from: pinballjim on July 31, 2011, 02:09:18 pm ---
I expect Disney products to be good quality. Why do I want to read a review that confirms this? I would divide your reviews into sections like, "books I expected to be good that are horrible", "books I never heard of that we liked", "books that annoy the crap out of me that my kid loves", "books that look good on an iphone."
--- End quote ---
I didn't address this in my last post, but it's worth mentioning.
Expecting Disney products to be good quality seems to me to be almost entirely without basis. Have you ever played a videogame based on a Disney character? They are almost without exception abominable. Have you ever seen a sequel to a Disney blockbuster? Aladdin 3, for example? Have you seen all of the Disney blockbusters? Chicken Little? Pocahontas? Cars 2 (or Cars 1, for that matter)? Hercules? Emperors New Groove? Have you seen any of the shows on the Disney Channel--Suite Life on Deck, Hannah Montana?
And nobody anywhere capitalizes on their properties more than Disney. They will slap their brands on absolutely everything from high-quality robotic toys, to garbage party-favors.
Disney makes a boatload of ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---. Everyone knows that. And there's no way to know where on Disney's wide quality spectrum a product falls other than buying the thing or finding out through some other means.
As for the sections you suggest dividing the site into, that just seems like a really poor way to organize a review site. All of your suggestions are worth noting in a given review (in fact, in I rate every single book in the category of how annoying it is for parents regardless of how much the kid loves it). But breaking the reviews into the seemingly arbitrary (and sort of narcissistic) categories that you suggest strikes me as not nearly as useful to most people as separating them up into more sensible, objective categories (like educational apps, games, books).
shmokes:
I'm not sure I understand your point. The reviews are already separated by genre (books, educational, games). They can also be easily sorted by score. I think that I will add age categories so parents can choose to filter out apps that aren't good for their kids age group. But the categories you suggest make no sense. Why do people care whether I expected the app to suck before I read the review? Why do they care whether I had ever heard of the app before I heard of it? I mean, that stuff might be fine for breathing words in the body of the article. But you think I should organize my site based on whether or not I thought the book would be good before I'd read it? That makes no sense to me. I really don't believe people would prefer that to what I'm doing now.
Is anybody else inclined to chime in here? Is there something to what pinball is saying that I'm missing?
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