Introducing the Limited Edition Museum

[LimitedEditionMuseum]

This is the very first time the website is being shown publicly. It is in its production stage and I need feedback, what is it missing, what needs to be taken out ect. It's about the museum and its vision goals and plans.It has the gaming section added but I really need feedback before the site is put onto promotional and fundraising guides and flyers. We have started some fund raising events but we are moving to large events like Comic Con, Botcon and other conventions and we need to be ready. PLEASE take a little time and give it a look, we need you! Thank you for all opinions.

[LimitedEditionMuseum]

http://www.thelimitededition.info/Home.html

[Parodius Duh!]

This seems like a far fetched idea but Best of luck, its going to be next to impossible getting people to try and donate their Brazilian Exclusive GI Joes, Thundercats Mad Bubbler Prototype, and Copies of US Sonic 1 for Master System.......among other items that only handfuls exist of in private collections. Most people buy these things for their own personal pleasure, not for others to look at, I know that personally Id rather all of my rare MISB Diaclone and G1 Japanese Transformers remain where they are, in my living room in glass display cases.


I mean honestly for this place to be really worthwhile you are going to be spending millions of dollars and have a ton of employees scouring for rarities. Just seems impossible to me. :/

[Jamtex]

Good luck with the museum, I work in this field too and I know it is hard to do anything. make sure people know if you are setting this up as a company, a non profit, trying to get museum status or as a private things by yourselves. I know that some people would not dontate to anything that is not a non profit or not a museum as if you do close down then you might end up selling everything and to their mind make lots of money of their items. Remember to have a document if people do donate you items, as you need to make clear if it is a donation or a permenant / long term loan, the latter means if you do close down then the items will be returned to the donatators.

Although personally I know that people are very willing to show off rare things for a few days in a convension, mainly as they will get a lot of praise and feedback but are generally less willing to do so in a long term museum setting so unless you happen to have a lot of items in the collection already or are very rich then I suggest you really look at what you are doing.

On your webpage.

Get rid of the silly outline font as it is bitty and is a little hard to read. especially in small sizes. On each page, use a limited number of fonts and try to keep them the same on each page. Try not to ues bold fonts except as headers as they can be harder to read and take up more screen space. Doing this will make the page look more professional.

You blog text is too big as it is cut off by the edge of the screen.

Remember that some people will be using netbooks and or tablets, currently your home page has the top 1/3 as the browser icons and the Go Daddy webpage advert, the middle third as your logo and the bottom third with a driving picture. Which means people have to scroll to see anything. Try to keep the graphic and logo to the top 1/3rd of the screen. You should have the main menu option visable on at least a 1024x768 display.

About Us should be more about the people running it and the venue itself. Have a seperate misson link for your mission page, maybe make the text smaller and have a collections page where you list what you may have and what things you may do. Have more pictures of what you have. I suggest you make the bakground white and take pictures of things on a white background as it does make it cleaner and more professional, most museums and galleries will have white backgrounds for this reason.

The Dontaing and Assistants page makes no sense, surely this should be where people get information about donating and helping out. The tet here maybe should be a sub menu of collections?

Put the contact form at the bottom taking up two columns so that certain fields can be bigger, some people have long email addresses, so youit is good to make sure they can see it all and typing information into a tiny box of comments means people will send you tiny messages, make the box as big as the messages you want to recieve.

[Game Hoarder]

ROFL I don't get it.

[StealthLurker]

Some errors on the home page:

"... weather its sports memorabilia ..."

"... stay tuned for updated and follow our blog that will give weekly updates."

.

[fluid_matrix]

I realize you say the website is in its production stage, but it seems rather amateurish to me. Do you really expect people to take that seriously?

[Ro-J]

"One more example is the longest running toy in America is Transformers ... Transformers are the only toy in the US that has been represented on retail shelves in one form or another since its beginning."

Really? Longer than Playmobil, Lego, Fisher Price's Little People.....? That seems a little hard to believe. Heck, I'm fairly certain Matchbox\Hot Wheels cars have filled the shelves every year since their debut.

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

"One more example is the longest running toy in America is Transformers ... Transformers are the only toy in the US that has been represented on retail shelves in one form or another since its beginning."

Really? Longer than Playmobil, Lego, Fisher Price's Little People.....? That seems a little hard to believe. Heck, I'm fairly certain Matchbox\Hot Wheels cars have filled the shelves every year since their debut.

Indeed.

Actually, where Transformers is concerned, there was a close to three year gap between Hasbro discontinuing "Generation 1" in 1990 and the soft re-boot of the toy line in "Generation 2" in 93 (which was just repaints and repacks of a lot of existing molds).

As much of a huge TF mark as I am, I can say that, as a toy enthusiast - there are many toys that have outdone Transformers in their retail shelf-lifetimes, many toys introduced at retail in the 60s (or earlier) have continued on to modern times with no significant interruptions or discontinuation. (Barbie, Lego, etc.)

[Flack]

I found typos and weird grammar issues in almost every sentence on the website. If you want people to take your site seriously, you need to hire a copy editor to help you edit your text -- not only for grammar, but for content editing. For example, the first sentence under "Mission" begins with:

LIMITED EDITIONS mission is to collect, preserve, study and exhibit toys from the early 50s( including childhood favorites like GI Joe and Barbie to today’s cartoon inspired toy lines like Pokemon) ...

The use of parenthesis there indicates that you'll be talking about toys from the early 50s, and then you throw in the part about today's cartoon inspired toy lines. In almost every sentence on the site I saw things that jumped out at me. Unless people are standing at the door of your museum, your website is the way people will judge your museum. You should strive to make it as professional as possible.

I also had the same issue Jamtex had with the cut-off text.

I agree with whoever said "WTF?" about the Donation and Assistants portion. And really ... the video game stuff doesn't fit with your theme at all. It's almost something that should be removed, or split off, or something. Your mission statement is now, "we collect mint in box toys, old and new, to display and study them. And also loose video game consoles and we will have game nights." To the average viewer, that leap will be hard to make.

On a personal note, I would have a hard time donating toward a project asking for "hundreds of thousands of dollars" knowing that whoever was running it couldn't afford web hosting and was using a free site with a huge banner at the top. To me, that reads "I need hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I can't afford $5/month at the moment."

[Flack]

PS: I'd have to question the Transformer claim as well. Lincoln Logs were released in 1916 and have been for sale ever since.

[Parodius Duh!]

I just really cant see anyone wanting to donate rare items to this cause, maybe if this was somehow involved with the Smithsonian then Im sure donations and Items would be flowing in, but as far as a private museum goes, there is really no way and it seems like you guys dont have much of a clue about toys and action figures. Ive been collecting rare toys for almost 2 decades and own some incredible pieces (Including a prototype from the unreleased 4 inch Alien toyline from Kenner) and I could totally pick your site apart right now but I wont.

[LimitedEditionMuseum]

Oh wow. Thanks guys so far for the replies. The first thing, we are not asking for toy donations and we are in the process of becomming non profit. Actually, so far its my personal collection of over 20 thousand items. We put together a group of people in various fields to help build on collections that I don't deal in...and that's not s lot. I was also getting the amature vibe from the website,that's exactly why I opened it up to you guys. We don't have a designer yet. We have some backers already and some business majors to help on that side. We also have some major fundraising plans with supporters. My part now is to get the buzz going. Apart from grammor, how can the website be improved? Thanks guys. Once again,you are the first step.

[MachineGex]

PS: I'd have to question the Transformer claim as well. Lincoln Logs were released in 1916 and have been for sale ever since.

I was just about to mention Lincoln logs, hot wheels, Barbies, and Tinker Toys.
Even if you went with action figure, Barbie or Ken would beat them by a decade or two.

Also, I am one of the "worstest" spellers in the world. Double check your posts before you hit reply. Speller check it, since you have the same problem as me. I make a lot of errors, but you have me beat by a mile. :)

[LimitedEditionMuseum]

As far as the things mentioned, I was just trying to give a little history, I guess I should clean it up if it's museum info right. We are going to have a huge Transformer focus that's why I added the info. I have been collecting for almost 30 years so I know my stuff but I don't know everything.I see now that the site seems rushed and very incomplete. I don't need to be picked apart, just say what you think needs to be edited. As far as history,maby I should keep it off the site all together and just do small captions with the photos.

[LimitedEditionMuseum]

Sorry about my grammor guys. We have a proofreader that will be helping us out.

[badinsults]

When it comes to making website, only you can be the driver of design and content. Asking others to help out will only lead to the long road of failure.

As of right now, the site has a quality level of a 1998 era Geocities site, with text clipping, stretched images, images that are actually massive but shrunk down using HTML code, banner ads, the huge "website name" banner, the unimaginative "black background, white bold text" presentation, and the appeals for donations. In addition, if you are even remotely serious about making a website this ambitious, you are going to need to create a backend with a server side language (like PHP), rather than making HTML pages for everything. Plus using a database is probably going to be a must.

[Emperor Megas]

This seriously looks like a Geocities/AngelFire/Tripod site, circa 1998. If you're serious about this thing, and are actually soliciting financial backers and contributors, I'd take that site down right away and start from scratch. The only 'buzz' that site is drumming up is negative.

[JSoup]

ROFL I don't get it.

This. Seems like it's a small timer trying to be too many things all at once.

Also, I don't see any classic gaming crap there, so shouldn't this thread be in Off Topic?