What should a freeware game website targetted towards such an audience look like? I'm going to finally put a final design for my website and spend more than 2 hours on it. I want those hours to be well-spent, with appropriate age-specific content and not just the fillers I've been using. Any suggestions?
Of course bright, ADHD compliant colors, probably flash for menus etc, since kids don't really care if a site validates with the W3C However, I work in a middle school computer lab, and before they got blocked by our filter, a *lot* of kids went to spikything.com or addictinggames.com. Those two (the last time I checked) were just about opposites, in that addicting games was really simple, but had hundreds of games, and spikything was flashy and smooth. They both seemed to be equally popular though. I guess qunatity + quality of games / content / features is much more important when it comes to that demographic than design / aesthetics. Like I said, I've been able to observe how they surf and it really doesn't seem to matter what the site looks like, as long as it has a LOT of games or the content they want.
sound advice - it seems I should be spending more time with my compiler than with notepad. To save myself the trouble, I'll put togeather a simple, intuitive design and just make sure that it doesn't look "gay." That's a turnoff for some kids.
Without doing a lot of research, I'd say your best bet would be to aim it at the older audience. Just looking at the trends of younger kids, it seems if it's cool with the older kids it's cool with them. For this moment only, if you can lean towards an 'anime' feel or look you'd probably appeal to both fairly easily. However, trends do change. Hope that helps!